Interested in a career change? Looking for a new opportunity? The BSW/MSW Job Fair will feature 50 social service organizations with open part-time and full-time positions. The job fair will be held virtually on April 23, 2021.

Jenny Nicholson, MSW, Creator of the virtual poverty game "SPENT"

Dr. Craig Gundersen, ACES Distinguished Professor, Director of Undergraduate Studies, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

Clinical professor and MSW alumna, Julie Muñoz-Nájar, has been awarded a prestigious fellowship at the Social Work Health Futures Lab, a national program of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and hosted by the Portland State University School of Social Work.

The 26 futures-fellows collaborative is comprised of a diverse array of social work educators, researchers, practitioners, and students. The group is facilitating the discovery of foresight practice by introducing futures thinking frameworks and bringing futures experts into lab conversations around topics like refugee justice, belonging, technology harms, and climate change, etc.

Professor Karen Tabb Dina will be present at the 2021 Stand Against Racism Campaign, hosted by the University of Illinois YWCA, taking place virtually April 19-22. Tabb will discuss her research area of mental health and maternal mortality and how it relates to racism as a public health crisis. All talks can be viewed on the YWCA Facebook page.

Before COVID-19, about 10% of children in Illinois, ages 1-17, required mental health services of some kind. That translates into about 280,000 youths. And those figures were exacerbated by the pandemic.

How well those needs are being met is being studied by Tamara Fuller, director of Children and Family Research Center.

Fuller was awarded a four-year grant from the Illinois Children’s Healthcare Foundation to evaluate the implementation and impact of children’s mental health systems of care in five Illinois communities.

PATH (formerly known as IM+CANS when launched in 2018) is a partnership between the Illinois Department of Healthcare and Family Services, the School of Social Work at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, and the Office of Medicaid Innovation. Its mission is to train and support community providers in using tools such as the IM+CANS, a comprehensive lifespan tool for assessing the needs and strengths of people who require mental health treatment, along with other services and resources, to transform behavioral health in the state of Illinois.

Upon graduating, Bruna Cardoso Lopez, MSW '17, began working for the International Rescue Committee, which provides assistance for people whose lives are impacted by conflict and disaster, including the climate crisis, to survive and recover.

Bruna shares her experiences as an MSW student, and how the School of Social Work prepared her to critically analyze policy and how it impacts practice.

The School of Social Work is striving to provide more continuing education webinar opportunities for alumni and practitioners in our community. If you are interested in being a CEU speaker, please fill out this form and someone will be in touch with you.