Mary Richmond Accomplishments

Introduction: Mary Richmond was born in Belleville, Illinois in 1961. She became an orphan at a very young age; she was 4. She had to go live with her grandmother and aunts in Baltimore, Maryland. She grew up in an environment full of social and political discussions because her grandmother was a women’s suffragist. She was home schooled until the age of 11 because her grandmother and aunts did not believe in traditional education. She was very dedicated to reading and she self-taught herself. At the age of 11 she was transferred to a public school and she graduated high school at the age of 16. After she graduated, she went to live with one of her aunts in New York until she became very ill and moved to Baltimore, leaving Mary in poverty and all alone. After two years of being in this situation, Mary went back to

Baltimore, where she got a job as a bookkeeper and became involved with the Unitarian Church, where she developed social skills.

At the age of 28 years, she applied for Assistant Treasurer of the Charity Organization Society (COS). This organization gave services to disabled, poor and needy people, which led her to give her contributions to social work. She worked with poor families by going to their houses as a “friendly visitor”, which was her first type of casework, and helped the poor with their situations. She also did research on how to turn charity into social work.

Mary Richmond is considered one of the main contributors to the social work field. Even with her difficult life she never limited herself to help others. When she started working at the COS, her job was to raise awareness of the organization and fundraise for the organization; however, as she became more experienced she went on to become a “friendly visitor”, friendly visitors were case workers back in the day and they went to people's houses in order to help them improve life situations and continue on with a better life. After her major contributions to the Cos she became the general secretary of the Philadelphia Society for Organizing Charity and during her time in this

organization she founded the Pennsylvania Child Labor Committee, the Public Charities Association, the juvenile court, and the Housing Association, she was also associated with charities that provided teaching materials for one of the organizations founded by her. She began to conduct research on how the charity work could be transformed into social work in order to help people in need and eventually wrote books about her researches. These books and researches occurred when in 1909 she became the director of the Charity Organizational Department of the Russell Sage Foundation in New York, where with the help of the organization she helped establish networks of social work and a method by which they should work, which led to her books based on her ideas of social work. Some examples of books written by her expressing her social work related ideas are Social Work Diagnosis (1917), What is Case Work? An Introductory Description (1923), Friendly Visiting Among the Poor (1899), among others. She taught and did research in the New York School of Philanthropy even though she did not attend college herself. One of the beliefs that she expressed based on these books and her research studies such as One Hundred Eighty-Five Widows with Fred Hall, which focused on the family, work and experience of a widow, was that the relationship between the people and their social environments greatly influence their status. She believed that a person’s problems should be first addressed by their closest individuals, such as family members, friends, neighbors or community and then turn to the government for help in order to address their problems and come up with a solution. She developed ones of the bases of social work, the believe that a social worker should focus on a person’s strengths rather than their weaknesses or blaming them for their problems. Due to her contributions to the social work field, organizations such as philanthropic organizations are still financially helping the field of social work.