Interview with Nancy Wackstein, who speaks about macro practice in social work. Interviewer: I’d like to introduce Nancy Wackstein, who’s the Director of Community Engagement and Partnerships at Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service. Welcome, Nancy. Nancy: Thank you, Dana. Interviewer: And you wanted to start off by kind of talking to the students about how you ended up starting working and doing macro practice work. Nancy: Well, sure. And let me just say I’ve been at Fordham Graduate School of Social Service only for 2 and 1/2 years. The bulk of my career was spent working both in city government and for a nonprofit organization in New York City. So my work here at Fordham follows a long career in doing advocacy, and policy, and administrative work. I’m a social worker. I got my MSW many decades ago from Columbia. And the reason I went into social work always was to change the world. I’m of a generation in the late ’60s, early ’70s that became very socially active around the Vietnam War, stopping the Vietnam War, and other social issues of the day, like civil rights, and women’s rights, and gay rights, and all the turmoil that was happening in our country around that time. Actually, the time we’re in now is reminding me more and more of that time, so maybe there’s even more relevance to this conversation. So when I went to social work school, it was very much to see how I could get better skills to help change policies. I felt there was profound inequality in our society and wanted to do something about it. I come from a family of teachers and helpers, and I just was always pretty aware of what the world around me looked like, even though I didn’t have the words back then of understanding what privilege was and who had it and who didn’t. And social work school actually was a good place to learn more about that. As I said, it was a time of social teaching around social justice. I think here at GSS we still teach about that. So right out of social work school, I got a job with an advocacy organization here in New York called Citizens’ Committee for Children. And I wrote reports and did a lot of organizing, actually, around issues affecting homeless families and children. And homelessness in New York in the ’80s, which is the era I’m talking about, was quite politicized and very, very public. Every day in the newspapers– and this was a time when people get their news from newspapers– there was something about the conditions of homeless children and families and these horrible welfare hotels. And so it was very, very compelling to me. These were very poor people and generally poorly educated, poorly housed, et cetera. So I wanted to do something about it. And it was really one of the most remarkable phases of my career, because we did do something about it. And I remember, even as a very young social worker out of graduate school, meeting with the commissioner of HRA, the Human Resources Administration, to talk about how to improve conditions in welfare hotels, and congregate shelters, and things like that. It was quite a heady experience for a young person. And from there, I was hired by David Dinkins. David Dinkins ultimately became the mayor of New York City, the first African-American mayor of New York City. But he hired me based on my work around homeless advocacy for his staff when he was Manhattan Borough president. And then I kept writing reports about homeless children. So, for me, writing, being able to write and understand how to speak to different audiences was a key part of that era of my career. And I think it’s one of the things that you learn in social work school, I think, is that you have to be able to speak to different stakeholder groups– elected officials, clients, and everybody in between. So that was a skill that really helped me in my career. And then when David Dinkins was elected mayor, I was the director of a unit of the mayor’s office on homelessness, which was quite a demanding job, and was leading policy around that. And tough job. I left then to– and it’s interesting. My career is– I never set out and said, oh gee, I want to work for an elected official. I want to work for the mayor. I never said, oh, I want to run a nonprofit organization, but this is what I ended up doing. So when I needed to get out of the mayor’s office, I was working all the time, and it was very, very tough to be the subject of attacks by everybody, from the New York Post to advocates, who used to be my friends, et cetera. So I really wanted to do something else. So through a connection, somebody I knew from the world of homelessness, the head of Henry Street Settlement at the time, told me that there was a job available running a settlement house on the Upper East Side called Lenox Hill Neighborhood House, and I was hired by the board to run that. I was young. I was not yet 40. They wanted somebody who could raise the profile of that organization. And the settlement house is a really– it’s a community-based organization that’s placed based, placed in one community, doing work with multiple generations, providing services, and community building, and all kinds of interesting things going on there. They even had a fitness center. I had to learn about what the proper temperature of the pool would be, which I did not learn in social work school. And so that was a wonderful, wonderful job. A settlement house is like a family in a way. Yes, you supervise the staff, but they’re also your colleagues. And a whole lot of different stakeholder groups, from community people, to the board of directors, to clients, to staff. And I think that part of social work training, as I said earlier, is to learn how to manage and manage different groups and weigh those different issues. […]
