The first Gorilla Social Work Day was held Sept. 12, at Pittsburg State University. The event included interactive workshops, opportunities to connect, agency displays, and continued education.
Professor Kristen Humphrey, the director of the Bachelor of Social Work program, and assistant professor Jeremey Wolfe, the director of the Master of Social Work program, organized the event.
“We’ve been wanting to do this for a long time,” Humphrey said. “We thought it would be a great idea to bring social workers and social work students together for a conference, and we just decided to jump in and do it.”
The workshops specifically looked at the professional needs and for licensure in Kansas and Missouri. You have to have specific CEU credits, so they try and fulfill those credits. They include topics like ethics, suicide awareness, multiculturalism, diagnosis, and assessment. Humphrey specifically talked about ethics of AI use in social work practice.
“We also recognize we need to have a local professional development opportunity in the area,” Wolfe said. “It does happen a little bit, but we haven’t really done that at Pitt State. We think it’s important that people look at us for professional development.”
More than double what they expected signed up for the event. This was very shocking for Humphrey, as this is the first year that the event has been hosted.
“We felt like there was a need for it and a desire for it and then I think we may have even underestimated the desire for it,” Humphrey said. “Because within a half of an hour of posting it online, we had somebody signed up. Then the number of registrations has exceeded our expectations. We think it’ll just continue to grow every year.”
Pitt State has bachelor’s and master’s accredit programs for social work. The master’s program is in the middle of finishing accreditation, but the bachelor’s program has been accredited since 1975. Humphrey and Wolfe are very passionate about social work.
“Social work is such a broad field,” Humphrey said. “Social workers are working in so many areas and help people when they are at times of crisis and need. So social workers are the kind of people that step in and walk alongside people in their journey, and we help people to recover, we help people to heal. We help people to meet their goals and as you see, we feel really strongly about our profession.”
Social work provides 70 percent of all mental health services in the United States according to Humphrey.
“We are all over the helping profession,” Wolfe said. “You’ll find us in hospitals, or schools, and nonprofit agencies. You can find us as private therapists, helping people at hospice, home health, and all sorts of places where we help people. I think that’s one of the things that’s attractive to social work I believe that there’s no wrong place for us to try to help other people. I think that’s part of our broad appeal or approach in social work.”