Message to Students
Students,
This book is significant in several ways. It is the very first openly licensed text specifically for the human services profession. Second, it benefitted both from original writing, but also the steadily developing openly licensed world of academic works. As an interdisciplinary field, we were able to draw on multiple existing openly licensed works.
What do you recall about March 2020? Sudden lockdowns impacted all of us with loss of employment and every day routines. Human services majors, in particular, were not only increasingly caring for family members but also children who were unable to attend school or child care. Students still attended college, but with fewer resources, emotional, mental and also financial.
I made a pretty rash decision in the summer of 2020. I started adapting an openly licensed resource for social work from Ferris State University into an openly licensed text for human services majors. It was pretty rough–a few new chapters, along with rapidly updated information and repaired broken links. But it was enough to save those students $180 at a time of diminishing resources and for that, we were all grateful.
The opportunity to create a more comprehensive text arose when Open Oregon Educational Resources offered me the chance to work with professional editors, additional authors, an equity consultant and project manager in 2022. While the urgency of the pandemic has faded, the call for breaking down the barriers to knowledge is no less important. What you are reading now is the result of the efforts of many who believe in the importance of making knowledge access equitable; making it “free” is just the beginning.
This book is an overview of an extremely broad profession. You will explore the many settings and jobs that will be open to you in the human services field. You will learn about working with specific populations and settings such as working with children, families, older adults, people with disabilities, people with substance use disorders, military members, and in criminal justice and healthcare settings.
This text includes two critical concepts that affect all of us. Mental health and the related practices of self care are touched on in several chapters, but there is also a chapter devoted specifically to mental health care and settings, and mental health disorders.
In addition, this text contains an approach to the history of social services that does not appear in any human services text, commercial or openly licensed. The inclusion of this work is possible because of the scholarly and openly licensed work by Kelechi Wright, MEd, LCPC, LPC; Kortney A. Carr, LCSW, LSCSW; and Becci A. Akin, PhD, all associated with the School of Social Welfare at the University of Kansas.
Specifically it discusses the ways that trauma imposed on Native and Black populations in the United States has contributed directly to the creation of the human services and social work profession. The trauma of enslaving Black people and stealing land from Native Americans, and the disruption of family relationships in both groups contributes to the disproportionate need for social services and continued discrimination against both groups today. Students of human services and professionals in the field must understand the past in order to practice ethically in today’s world.
As the text has evolved, students have been actively involved in giving feedback and ideas about additions and improvements to the text. Please join in by offering your ideas and input.
–Elizabeth B. Pearce