School of Social Work

Jae Lange says they were a social worker long before a job or degree made it official. “I was born one, and I will die one,” says Jae, a first-generation student in the B.S.W. Program who also is a direct service specialist for a grant-funded project administered by the School of Social Work.  Marsha and […]

Paola Roldán, a rising third-year doctoral student at the School of Social Work, spent three weeks this summer in the 2023 ICPSR Summer Program in Quantitative Methods at the University of Michigan, thanks to a diversity scholarship she received this spring. The scholarship enables graduate students to receive additional skills in quantitative analysis. “Having this […]

Dear SSW community, Many of you may be aware of recent Supreme Court ruling, 303 Creative LLC v. Elenis, has upheld a position that erode the rights of same-sex couples. The leadership of the SSW at VCU affirms the school’s commitment to honor and advocate for all human rights and joins the National Association of […]

One VCU School of Social Work faculty member is currently working abroad in South Africa, and a second will be headed to Mongolia this summer – both as repeat recipients of Fulbright awards. Maurice Gattis, Ph.D., an associate professor, was named a Fulbright U.S. Scholar for Social Sciences and Humanities and has been working in […]

Dear School of Social Work community, It is heartbreaking to reach out to you once again in the wake of a hate crime, this time directed at the LGBTQ+ community in Colorado Springs.  We grieve for those five killed and 18 injured, and their families; and we stand in solidarity with those directly impacted in […]

Two VCU School of Social Work associate professors, Maurice N. Gattis, Ph.D., and M. Alex Wagaman, Ph.D., have secured a Virginia Housing Trust Fund Homeless Reduction Grant The $883,014 grant builds on a previously funded project and will work to reduce homelessness among LGBTQ+ youth, pregnant and parenting youth, and young people at the intersection […]

The news that Ph.D. student Sarah Lineberry has been named a winner of VCU’s Champions of Accessibility Award for 2021 capped a notable academic year for her and her colleagues in the School of Social Work doctoral program. Lineberry was one of nine winners university-wide and one of only two students to earn the champions […]

The VCU School of Social Work and its Child Welfare Stipend Program hosted a panel discussion, Fostering Truth: A Conversation About Best Practices in Working with and Engaging Youth in Foster Care who Identify as LGBTQ+, on April 28, 2021. The panel session, available for viewing through the YouTube archive above, featured: Mikaela Doench, M.S.W. […]

VCU social work alum Sara Van Tongeren, Rev. Jennifer Adams and Jeffrey Sorenson received social justice awards from the city of Holland, Michigan, in January. For VCU School of Social Work alum Sara Van Tongeren (M.S.W.’08/SW), a “surreal” seven-hour city council meeting in August 2020 was delayed gratification for the passage of a long-awaited nondiscrimination […]

The four newest members of the VCU School of Social Work faculty are two instructors for the online M.S.W. Program format and two visiting scholars who are part of the university’s iCubed initiative (Institute for Inclusion, Inquiry and Innovation). We caught up with them and asked about their experiences so far in the 2019-20 academic […]