ISP Update / September, 2005

ISP Update / September, 2005

Contents

Greetings
Goals

Initiatives
Closing Thoughts

GREETINGS

I hope you are all well and wondering where September went.....Below is a set of GOALS and INITIATIVES for ISP for the 2005-06 year. As ISP Liaisons, friends, and NASW Chapter members, I am urging you to read them carefully and see where you might be able to make a contribution to our mission. Remember: we are trying to teach/encourage all social workers to be effective advocates at their state legislatures! Paste these goals and initiatives on your bulletin board.

In the Initiatives section, please see if there are any of them that you might wish to pursue....some of you have already signed up....but we could use some others to share the workload or leadership. Email me to let me know of your interest and I will connect you with other ISP members.

GOALS

To produce at least one ISP Annual BSW/MSW Contest entry from each Social Work Education Program.

To increase visits to the ISP website, www.statepolicy.org, to 2,000 per academic month.

To obtain annual dues of $25 from 350 persons.

To have 9,000 Social Work student visits to their state legislatures this year.

To help develop 50 student field placements with a state legislator.

To assist/encourage at least 25 student(s) participate in introducing a bill at their state legislature.

To increase the PhD dissertation entries to 10 this year.

To raise $5,000 from our annual ISP auction (Chicago 06). Be thinking of items to donate.

INITIATIVES

To plan a 10th anniversary celebration of ISP during the APM in Chicago, Feb. 06---where we started out in 1997. Kathy Byers and Ed Gumz are working on this event. Hold Feb. 17 evening for dinner, speakers, awards, etc.

To make the ISP website a key portal to policy for ALL social work students. Tell all students with a policy question to start at www.statepolicy.org!To develop a supplement to the CSWE Accreditation standard that requires "policy practice" in the BSW and MSW curricula. Ron Green, Kathy Byers and Marcie Jeffries are volunteering to do this.To connect more closely with ACOSA. Ellen Netting and Irene Queriro-Tajalli are being asked to head this effort.To develop guidelines for establishing field placements for SW student within the legislative arena. Wendy V.Daniels, Aimee Perron Siebert, Pam Brown, Toby Hur, and Marcie Jeffries are interested in this initiative.To identify educative activities for students in ed programs more than 50 miles from the state capital. Jeff Schrenzel and Anne Nichols are interested in this initiative.To support The Policy Conference in Washington, DC in June 16-19, 2006. The theme of the conference is: Shifting the Tides: Challenges for Policy Practice. Call for papers will be out in November. Hotel will be the elegant Mayflower Hotel in the heart of DC. Begin thinking of your proposals and presentations now!To plan and develop another video on Coalition Building for state legislative initiatives. Bob Schneider is beginning to develop this video.To develop position papers (2 pagers) on various important and current issues and policies: Medicaid, Student Loan Forgiveness, Social Security, No child Left Behind Act, TANF. Bob Schneider and his MSW students are working on Medicaid.To increase our sponsorship of ISP. Seven sponsors now assist us with the contest or dissertation award with cash. Can you find others?To update our ISP Bibliography on the "New Federalism." A PhD student at VCU is expanding our bibliography currently and we will have at least 400+ entries soon.

To solicit more photos of students in action in the legislative arena for our website under Media. Please send your photos of student a jpg format to Joseph Reiter, our webmaster, at jnr8375@fsu.edu. Provide a brief description.

CLOSING THOUGHTS

This is enough to think about, right? ISP always has an ambitious agenda and we are proud of how much you all do to promote our mission. Keep it up and let's have a very, very outstanding year.....all the best...Bob