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DESCRIPTION OF EVENT

What would social service work look like if all people had the human right to water, food, housing, education and jobs at a living wage?  These rights are defined in the UN’s Universal Declaration of Human Rights and its covenants.  The USA is one of the few nations that has never ratified the Covenant on Economic Human Rights. That’s the truth.

Learn about how Truth Commissions are used to claim economic human rights for all and the basic steps for organizing an effective truth commission in your agencies, communities, states and nation.  Breakout groups will allow for discussion and questions about this dynamic tool for transformative social action.

PROPOSED EVENT AGENDA

1. What are truth commissions?
2. Their history/how they have been used for social justice?
3. What are economic human rights, and how have truth commissions been used to advance
   economic human rights in the United States?
4. What are the key elements of a truth commission?
5. What are the steps for organizing truth commissions?
6. What is the necessary follow up of truth commission findings?
7. Break out into small groups and discuss  how social workers can use and advance truth commissions
8. Report back
9. Discuss proposed truth commission on unjust child removal and other next steps

SWEPT—Social Workers Ending Poverty Together—is a chapter of SWAA and of the National Welfare Rights Union (NWRU). We work closely with NWRU’s sister organization, the National Union of the Homeless (HUH). Individually and collectively, members agree to

•  focus on ending poverty, taking leadership from people directly affected by poverty
• study the NWRU Mission and related materials to shape our program
• help shape collective SWEPT projects and evaluate them
• take on tasks to accomplish our projects

If you are actively involved in any role or capacity in the transformative work to end poverty, and you would like to study and work with us, send an email to SWEPTnow@googlegroups.com or contact any SWEPT member.

SOCIAL WORKERS ENDING POVERTY TOGETHER (SWEPT) BRIEF BIOS

Rosemary Barbera, MSS, PhD, is a social worker who has worked on human rights issues in Chile, Bolivia and Philadelphia. She has worked with survivors of torture in Chile and the US as well as working with survivors of economics human rights violations. She teaches social work at La Salle University (Philadelphia, PA) and works in immigrant rights.

Monica Beemer, MSW, is a social worker and organizer for the Houseless Bill of Rights and the Welfare Rights Union; she served as executive director of Sisters of the Road and KBOO Community Radio in Portland, Oregon and currently works with Street Books, bike-powered librarians for the houseless community, and Outside the Frame, a film school for houseless youth.

Larry Bresler, MSW, JD,  is the director of Organize Ohio, an organization that works to promote and assist grassroots organizing in Ohio; for the past 17 years he has served as an adjunct faculty member at Case Western Reserve University’s School of Applied Social Sciences.

Mary Bricker-Jenkins, MSW, PhD was a welfare worker in 1968 when a social work professor slipped her a piece of paper suggesting she attend a certain meeting.  She did, and met a circle of social workers organizing with the National Welfare Rights Organization and the original Poor People’s Campaign.  She has never left that circle.   She retired from Temple University in 2005.

Michel Coconis, MSW, PhD has been teaching social work, advocacy, justice, and action in several social work programs across the U.S. while also working as a mitigation investigator for persons facing the death penalty. In other work and research, she has worked with the Poor People’s Campaign work through the Social Welfare Action Alliance and through the Ohio Gathering; reproductive freedom; constitutional reform against corporate personhood and campaign finance; media and digital literacy; community and family violence intervention and prevention; and, more recently, disaster preparedness and eco-social work.

Kristin Colangelo, LCSW, LCADC, CSS, is a clinical social worker and formerly homeless mother with over 20 years experience educating and organizing among the poor and dispossessed, building the movement to end poverty and for our rights to housing, healthcare, and freedom from hunger with The National Union of the Homeless, Put People First PA, National Welfare Rights Union and the Kairos Center.

Khalilah Collins, MSW, calls herself a social justice practitioner.  As the Project Manager for the police deflection project in Louisville. KY, her work focuses on addressing social injustices through community organizing and education. She teaches practice from this perspective at Spalding University (Louisville) and Salisbury University (Maryland).

Rev. Rowan Fairgrove, EPs, MLIS, is a retired Research Librarian, an organizer of the annual Homeless Person’s Interfaith Memorial in Santa Clara County, and a volunteer with the Poor People’s Campaign in California.

Barbara Kasper, MA, MSW, is a retired SUNY Brockport social work professor and convener of the Social Welfare Action Alliance (SWAA), a national organization of radical human service workers.

Renee Koubiadis, MSW/LSW, is a member of the NJ Poor People’s Campaign Coordinating Committee; works as the Anti-Poverty Program Director at New Jersey Citizen Action facilitating the statewide Anti-Poverty Network.

Ann Rall, MSW, Ph.D, is an organizer and case worker with the  Michigan Welfare Rights Organization and the National Welfare Rights Union and teaches social work at Eastern Michigan University.

Laura Rodgers, LCSW, is committed to social work practice that organizes with others for ending poverty and serves as Chief Impact Officer for Jewish Family Service of Atlantic & Cape May Counties, NJ.

Maureen Taylor, MSW, serves as the State Chairperson for the MI/Welfare Rights Organization & is an advocate who fights for the rights of low-income families and individuals both locally and nationally.

Dorothy Van Soest, MSW, PhD is Professor Emerita and former Dean, University of Washington.  She is a novelist activist who is on the Washington State Poor People’s Campaign Coordinating Committee.