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I’m Joan Pennell. I’m a professor of social work and I direct the Center for Family and
Community Engagement at North Carolina State University.
I’ll have to confess, when I was finishing up my undergrad, I wasn’t quite sure where
I wanted to go, so I thought, “Okay, I’ll be a social worker,” because I knew I liked
working on social causes. To be a social worker is to make a vow of
commitment and competence in terms of moving forward social change, in a good way.
In North Carolina, there’s a lot of look at how we should go about structuring juvenile
justice, and really trying to think of approaches that don’t end up with young people having
records, therefore reduced opportunities in terms of work and education. And instead to
figure out how can you give them that support at the crucial time.
The Center for Family and Community Engagement, on September 18th, 2008, was formally approved
by the Board of Trustees. Oh, I’ve seen a lot of positive impact.
I’m feeling very good about that impact. But I was quite touched by an email that I
received yesterday from a woman who had heard me speaking at a conference out in Utah. And
she said because of the two-day workshop on family group conferencing, later when she
was working at Republic of the Marshall Islands, she helped them incorporate the family group
conferencing right into their legislation. One of the ways that we have grown is developing
more of an international perspective, rather than being more—thinking within a country.
And I think we also have learned that we can learn so much from other countries.
So we carried out two workshops in Greensboro, very well enrolled, where people were really
looking at these issues. And I think it’s just a time in North Carolina where people
want to figure out some better ways of helping young people.
The crossover cases between child welfare and juvenile justice, these are often very
troubled and troubling young people. Without intervention, they’re the ones who are all
too likely to end up in an adult correctional system.
I think social work is incredibly important. The good thing about social work is that there’s
many different pathways in it, and so you will have what’s called direct practice,
working one on one or with families, then you will work with small groups, support groups.
Or you can be doing what we call macro practice, which is working more with communities, with
legislation, with policymaking. And as a discipline, yes, it is an area of
academic study which looks at how people are within their environments. It’s a person
and environment perspective. For as a profession, it’s about how do you do something to try
to make things better for people, all around the globe.
I’m just very fortunate that I have such wonderful staff there to work with, but also,
it just gives lots of opportunities for students to come in to do other work with us. But it’s
not only university students that we have involved, we also, because of our work with
families, have what we call youth partners, and these are young people who’ve received
services like child welfare, juvenile justice services—whatever. And they’re just part
of our training team. I really just adore working with students.
If someone is really interested in being a social worker, I think it’s a good idea
to just do a little bit of testing oneself out in different kinds of practice settings.
And one of the nice things that the program does here is it has what’s called pre-professional
placements for students—work in a community, work in an agency, and just get a feel as
to does this fit for them. North Carolina State University is a great
place to come and study social work. It’s got a faculty who are really committed to
teaching and involved in the community, so they’re not just talking academically, they’re
talking about work that they do. It’s just a really good social work student body.
When we’re in the Social Work Department, we really feel like we have
a home.