Community Immersion

We spent two days of this first week of the program in Community Immersion, an intensive introduction to social work practice in communities. I was grouped with 19 other student who will be in my Policy class come Tuesday morning. All but two of us are women; we are white, African American, Latina/o and Asian; and I am a generation older than all but one of the other students in the class, who I figure is still a dozen years younger than I am.

For our Community Immersion, we were assigned to Panorama City and Pacoima, two northeast San Fernando Valley communities where around 160 different gangs are active. Our hosts were staff members at Communities in Schools, a gang reduction and intervention organization that runs an after-school and job training program, organizes athletic events that bring gang members together to play basketball and football in local parks and has worked to get 750 union construction jobs in a massive new commercial development in Pacoima earmarked for their program participants.

Two of the CIS staff, Bobby Arias and Robert Hernandez, are MSW graduates from USC and made some of the concepts and language of social work that are still unfamiliar to me come alive. They are good people and doing remarkable work. Over the two days we spent in the Valley, we met with a variety of community groups and even the LAPD.

I enjoyed the opportunity to get to know this group of classmates. I carpooled with a young woman who moved to northern California from Guatemala when she was three. She's been working in a program for survivors of domestic violence in San Mateo. It seems that most of my classmates have been involved in some sort of social service work: one woman works the Peace over Violence hotline here in LA, another has been a job coach for disabled adults in Santa Barbara, another works at the St. Joseph Center in Venice.

It was difficult to return to a classroom Friday after such a rich time out in the community.