Service to Communities and the Wisconsin Idea
Each year, we host the Social Workers Confronting Racial Injustice Conference. This conference challenges social workers to engage in racial and social justice action and draws several thousand working social workers from Wisconsin and beyond who receive free CEUs. We also maintain active agreements with over 400 social services agencies in counties all around the state to place students – many who work directly with clients. Examples include, the Wisconsin Department of Children and Families and Centro Hispano
Much of the work at the school is in service to the Wisconsin Idea — the notion that the impact of the university should reach beyond the classroom and campus. The conference and placement of students with social service agencies are just two of many examples.
The following is an incomplete but representative list of the ways some of our faculty, through their research and collaborations, aid communities.
Active research examples:
- Understanding the decline in family child care providers in Wisconsin. Some results indicate that the reduction in Wisconsin childcare providers is linked to the expansion of 4-year old kindergarten.
- Surveys to determine what barriers parents report in using early childhood services.
Active research examples:
- Providing evidence on what works in supporting parent-child connections during periods of incarceration.
- Identifying addiction treatment gaps for people incarcerated or involved in the legal system.
Active research examples:
- Studies into the connection between neighborhood disadvantages and disability and how that shapes cognitive decline among older Mexican Americans.
- Demonstrating the importance of affordable housing to maintain health and wellbeing for older adults.
- Examining federal housing assistance impacts on adult health and child outcomes through better data linking.
Active research examples:
- Looking into Wisconsin adults’ attitudes about health and health disparities to inform better social policy interventions.
- Building more trauma-informed services for minoritized individuals who experience sexual assault.
- Trying to understand aging in autistic people through the creation of a new field of geriatric autism research.
Active research examples:
- Uncovering evidence suggesting that access to workplace accommodations for pregnant workers, granted in the 2022 federal Pregnant Workers Fairness Act, increases employment during pregnancy and improves maternal and infant health.
- Estimating the effects of reducing child poverty by half shows that racial disproportionality in child welfare system involveement could be reduced.
- A long-term study on the developmental, social, economic, and health consequences of the opioid epidemic on mothers and children in Wisconsin.
- Results showing increased child allowance in the 2021 child tax credit (our nation’s first near-universal child allowance policy) did not reduce employment among parents or caregivers.
Active research examples:
- Translating findings of experiences of students who trade sexual services, acts, and materials for financial compensation for university stakeholders to better support students’ needs.
- Adapting an evidence-based bystander intervention program on sexual violence specifically for LGBTQ+ college students.
- Helping universities create the necessary tools to improve how they prevent and respond to gender-based violence.