Mary Richmond And Jane Addams: Understanding The Nature Of Social Work

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Understanding the Nature of Social Work Introduction Mary Richmond and Jane Addams are two very influential women in social work history. They helped shape what social work is today. Mary Richmond helped with her charity organizations and Jane Addams with the settlement movement. Not only did they help shape the history of social work, but they paved the road for the generalist practice as well with their work at the micro and macro levels. They are two very different women with two very different approaches. Richmond Mary Richmond worked with charity organizations, the micro level, which focused more on individuals and families. This was her main concern in her career. She wanted to find out why individuals were so dependent on their families …show more content…

Addams had more of a liberal view on things. She felt the economy had a big part to play in the struggles that people had to face in their daily lives. So, because of this she worked more on the macro level of social work with the systems in people’s lives. One of the things she did in her career was to create the Hull House. The Hull House offered many things for the poor people living in the community around her. One of the things they offered was a daycare for children. She believed that since mothers could not pay for childcare they could not go to work so she helped by opening a daycare. Another thing she did was work with the immigrants in the community. She worked on the exploitation of immigrant’s and discrimination of immigrants by establishing the Immigrants’ Protective League. One of the things Jane Addams felt was important in her work was the she be friends with the people she worked with. She was not as worried about being professional, as she was about relating to the individuals. (Popple, …show more content…

Pretty soon she begins to find out what ought to be done to get rid of the ditch,” means several things for today’s society. One of the main things I think it means for social workers today is that the social worker should be more focused on what is causing the individual to have the problems he or she is having. Social workers will better help the individual if they help them by looking at the things that surround them. Instead of looking at the one issue that the person has the good social worker tries to uncover the main source of the issue and fix that instead. The good social worker doesn’t help them by solving the immediate problem but helps them with why they have this problem. Whether they have drug problems, mental problems, gambling problems or don’t budget their money. The social worker would focus on why they have this

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