By Paul R. Pace, News staff
The NASW Foundation has chosen the 2016-17 recipients of its scholarships and fellowships, and will award more than $428,000 to social work students across the country.
The Foundation is the largest funder of social work students who can study at any accredited social work program in the U.S.
Jennifer O’Brien, a student at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Social Work, received the Foundation’s Eileen Blackey Doctoral Fellowship in Welfare Policy (one award of $6,500).
The fellowship provides partial support to social work doctoral candidates who are engaged in dissertation research in welfare policy and practice.
O’Brien was selected based on her dissertation, “Risk Factors, Protective Factors, and Identification Practices for Child Welfare-Involved Domestic Minor Sex Trafficking Survivors.”
With a grant from the New York Community Trust’s Robert and Ellen Popper Scholarship Fund and Lois and Samuel Silberman Fund, the NASW Foundation launched Social Work HEALS in 2015, a collaborative endeavor between the Foundation and the Council on Social Work Education.
The objective of the grant is to strengthen the delivery of health care services in the United States by advancing the education and training of health care social workers. As part of the grant, one Social Work HEALS Policy Fellowship (up to $80,000) will be awarded in 2016 and five doctoral fellowships will be awarded each year of the anticipated five-year program.
The Foundation’s existing Jane Baerwald Aron Doctoral Fellowship, for social work doctoral candidates who are engaged in dissertation research in health care policy and practice, has been supplemented and incorporated into the Social Work HEALS program and will be one of the five doctoral fellowships awarded.
The HEALS program allows increased funding for fellowship and scholarship recipients and support for leadership and professional development activities.
From the July 2016 NASW News. NASW members can read the full story here.
