(From BCR Reports Spring 2001) [http://www.socialwelfareactionalliance.org/]
Ever wonder what you would find if you searched for Social Welfare Action Alliance or Bertha Capon Reynolds Society on the web? I did, and here’s what I found. For SWAA I found 47 hits for SWAA activity.
In Oregon, the Web says that the Social Welfare Action Alliance - Oregon Chapter - (Manzanita, Oregon) was an endorser of D2KLA, the Mobilization for Domestic and Global Justice held at the Democratic National Conference last summer. SWAA pops upon the Radical Social Work Resource List in the Twin Cites (http://www.geocities.com/rswsg/resource.html).
[The following links were added 6/20/04:]
Penn Social Work - Social Welfare Action Alliance (SWAA)
Social Welfare Action Alliance - Portland Oregon
The Social Welfare Action Alliance - Austin Chapter
And there are other chapters and projects...
According to the Web, Mary Bricker Jenkins of SWAA will present at a Spring 2001 forum on Welfare Reform sponsored by NASW. The next hit is for the Washington D.C. Chapter of the Committees of Correspondence for Democracy and Socialism, where Walter Teague of SWAA. (wteague@verizon.net) has posted photos of the Lansing conference of SWAA. Just visit http://www.redandgreen.org and click on the SWAA in Lansing - Photos link. Also note that the website has a list of social services in the Metro DC area, a great integration of services and activism in the Bertha Reynolds tradition. [Also new photos of the 2001 Conference and demonstrations in Philadelphia.]
SWAA is listed as a sponsor of the First Monday campaign about gun violence: http://www.firstmonday2000.com/social.html. SWAA is listed as an official student organization at Ohio State University. At what in the Buckeye state they call “that school up North”, a Michigan Daily article listed SWAA as supporting a rally in defense of affirmative action. The article says: “It’s great to see people come out for something they support and believe in,” said Mike Trepper, a Social Work second-year student and member of Social Welfare Action Alliance, a group that supports affirmative action. “I wouldn’t want anything but a diverse environment,” said Brett Seabury, a Social Work professor and SWAA member. Seabury noted many recent studies that cite the positive impact of diversity on campuses across the country.
The Washington State NASW chapter newsletter has an article about SWAA entitled “Social Work is Social Change”, written by Marilyn Moch, longtime membership committee and steering committee member. There were many other hits that had links to SWAA from other organizational websites.
Entering Bertha Capon Reynolds Society, one can find the following site that includes a tribute to Bertha by Billie Langston delivered at the NASW Leadership Academy: http://www.naswdc.org/NASW/piopeop/reynolds.htm. There are also a few dozen hits about BCRS activity prior to the name change. One of the interesting things about the Web is that as more and more social workers have personal websites, those that list SWAA or BCRS on their resumes produce hits! To see Michel Coconis’ web page, travel to http://www3.gvsu.edu/wcb/schools/GV/sw/coconism/coconism.html!
A good way to check out SWAA on the web is to use a free piece of software that searches across multiple search engines (Lycos, AltaVista, Directhit, Google, Yahoo and several others) for exact phrases and using Boolean logic. It can be found at Copernic.com and is called Copernic2OOO. It’s the best web tool for searching I’ve found. Try entering Social Welfare Action Alliance or Bertha Capon Reynolds Society. It produces many other links to social welfare activism. It is a freestanding program and doesn’t interfere with existing browsers, although you still use them to visit the hits it comes up with.
· Michael Dover
P.S. There is a discussion group on the web now at: SWAA discussion group on WEB http://groups.yahoo.com/group/bertha-swaa