This book focuses on the externally driven difficulties of service workers and agencies in shaping services -- such as the consequences of recent conservative social policies on agency life and the way in which the present political environment influences services through privatization.
Professing a policy of cultural and social integration, the American settlement house movement made early progress in helping immigrants adjust to life in American cities. However, when African Americans migrating from the rural South in the early twentieth century began to replace white immigrants in settlement environs, most houses failed to redirect their efforts toward their new neighbors. Nationally, the movement did not take a concerted stand on the issue of race until after World War II. In Black Neighbors, Elisabeth Lasch-Quinn analyzes this reluctance of the mainstream settlement house movement to extend its programs to African American communities, which, she argues, were assisted instead by a variety of alternative organizations. Lasch-Quinn recasts the traditional definitions, periods, and regional divisions of settlement work and uncovers a vast settlement movement among African Americans. By placing community work conducted by the YWCA, black women's clubs, religious missions, southern industrial schools, and other organizations within the settlement tradition, she highlights their significance as well as the mainstream movement's failure to recognize the enormous potential in alliances with these groups. Her analysis fundamentally revises our understanding of the role that race has played in American social reform.
This book explores the role and impact of the settlement house movement in the global development of social welfare and the social work profession. It traces the transnational history of settlement houses and examines the interconnections between the settlement house movement, other social and professional movements and social research. Looking at how the settlement house movement developed across different national, cultural and social boundaries, this book show that by understanding its impact, we can better understand the wider global development of social policy, social research and the social work profession.
Explains what a settlement house is, describes its role in the lives of poor children who live near it, and tells how the settlement house movement is still being felt today.
The settlement house movement, launched at the end of the nineteenth century by men and women of the upper middle class, began as an attempt to understand and improve the social conditions of the working class. It gradually came to focus on the "new immigrants"—mainly Italians, Slavs, Greeks, and Jews—who figured so prominently in this changing working class. Hull House, one of the first and best-known settlement houses in the United States, was founded in September 1889 on Chicago's West Side by Jane Addams and Ellen G. Starr. In a major new study of this famous institution and its place in the movement, Rivka Shpak Lissak reassesses the impact of Hull House on the nationwide debate over the place of immigrants in American society.
Contains over 230 alphabetically arranged entries that provide information about the men and women, institutions, and events that characterized the American Settlement Movement of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, focusing on the main currents of the movement.
How do migrants feel "at home" in their houses? Literature on the migrant house and its role in the migrant experience of home-building is inadequate. This book offers a theoretical framework based on the notion of home-building and the concepts of home and house embedded within it. It presents innovative research on four groups of migrants who have settled in two metropolitan cities in two periods: migrants from Italy (migrated in the 1950s and 1960s) and from mainland China (migrated in the 1990s and 2000s) in Melbourne, Australia, and migrants from Morocco (migrated in the 1950s and 1960s) and from the former Soviet Union (migrated in the 1990s and 2000s) in Tel Aviv, Israel. The analysis draws on qualitative data gathered from forty-six in depth interviews with migrants in their home-environments, including extensive visual data. Levin argues that the physical form of the house is meaningful in a range of diverse ways during the process of home-building, and that each migrant group constructs a distinct form of home-building in their homes/houses, according to their specific circumstances of migration, namely the origin country, country of destination and period of migration, as well as the historical, economic and social contexts around migration.
Chronicles the sweeping history of the storied Henry Street Settlement and its enduring vision of a more just society On a cold March day in 1893, 26-year-old nurse Lillian Wald rushed through the poverty-stricken streets of New York’s Lower East Side to a squalid bedroom where a young mother lay dying—abandoned by her doctor because she could not pay his fee. The misery in the room and the walk to reach it inspired Wald to establish Henry Street Settlement, which would become one of the most influential social welfare organizations in American history. Through personal narratives, vivid images, and previously untold stories, Ellen M. Snyder-Grenier chronicles Henry Street’s sweeping history from 1893 to today. From the fights for public health and immigrants’ rights that fueled its founding, to advocating for relief during the Great Depression, all the way to tackling homelessness and AIDS in the 1980s, and into today—Henry Street has been a champion for social justice. Its powerful narrative illuminates larger stories about poverty, and who is “worthy” of help; immigration and migration, and who is welcomed; human rights, and whose voice is heard. For over 125 years, Henry Street Settlement has survived in a changing city and nation because of its ability to change with the times; because of the ingenuity of its guiding principle—that by bridging divides of class, culture, and race we could create a more equitable world; and because of the persistence of poverty, racism, and income disparity that it has pledged to confront. This makes the story of Henry Street as relevant today as it was more than a century ago. The House on Henry Street is not just about the challenges of overcoming hardship, but about the best possibilities of urban life and the hope and ambition it takes to achieve them.