Volunteering for Family Violence Prevention Services

For my service learning assignment I decided to volunteer my time at the Family Violence Prevention Services also known as the Battered Women’s and children’s shelter. During my time at the shelter I learned so much about the children I was working with and even about the women that live at the shelter. I was expecting to go in there and help in positive way to change lives and in a way they helped change mine. I learned a lot about many things that we learned in class such as the strength perspective, empowerment, and cultural diversity.

The time that I spent at the shelter helped me learn and grow as a person, student, and social worker. In my first day at the shelter two other students from my class and me got assigned to work in the children’s activity center. Our duty was to provide activities for the children to work on.

The purpose of the activities were to help the children find ease and comfort from the problems in their life that work causing anxiety and to help them feel a greater sense of normalcy living in the shelter while also empowering them.

We worked at the shelter once a week from January until March, the first week we were there we noticed that the children did not trust us at first and were very timid and quiet. We would do several activities with them, one of the first ones we did was an activity called “Face Charades”.

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In this activity the children and we had to let everyone know how they were feeling without saying anything, only being able to use facial expressions. The purpose of this activity was to teach the children emotions and help recognize the face to the appropriate emotion. By learing the faces that go with their feelings this will teach the children emotions and help recognize the face to the appropriate emotion. This will enhance their ability to recognize other people’s cues of how they are feeling. This was a great activity for them because the children learned to express themselves and learn the social cues of the emotions for themselves and those around them.

Another activity we gave them was one called “Love Reef” we assigned this activity to them because it was for Valentine’s Day. In the activity we gave them a reef and they were to paste hearts around the reef that they could decorate in anyway but the purpose was to write something in each heart that they liked about themselves. This was a very interesting idea because while we were helping the children make the reefs we would ask them to tell us what they liked about themselves and many of them could not find anything they like about themselves. This made me sad because the children did not have any positive self esteem in them. During this assignment I found myself going back to what we learned in class about the strength perspective and about empowerment and we used what we learned in the book and applied it to the children. “The strengths perspective is a belief in the basic goodness of humankind, a faith that individuals, however downtrodden or debilitated, can discover strengths in themselves that they never knew existed. The strengths or empowerment approach is a crucial part of effective therapy and increasingly articulated in the social work literature.” (Mullaly, 1993).

No matter how little or how much may be expressed at one time, as Weick, Rapp, Sullivan, and Kisthardt (1989) explain, people often have a potential that is not commonly realized. A belief in human potential is tied to the notion that people have untapped, undetermined reservoirs of mental, physical, emotional, social and spiritual abilities which can be mobilized in times of need. This is where professional helping comes into play, in tapping into the possibilities, tapping into not what is but what can be. This approach helped out a great deal with the children whenever one of the children did not know what to write we would encourage them and compliment to find something positive about themselves, when they could not find anything we would tell them that they were very smart, witty, nice, caring, kind, friendly, etc. The children would feel happy when we encouraged them in a positive way and they knew we really meant it. After a while they found it easier and easier to find positive things they liked about themselves, and every time they succeeded in pointing out something they liked about themselves we would praise them for it.

According to the NASW of Illinois chapter “The strengths perspective supports our basic social work values. Social workers are mandated to respect the dignity and worth of the person according to the NASW Code of Ethics. The strengths perspective is used to find and focus on these competencies that the client possesses. And in closing, social workers always seek to enhance the client’s capacity to meet their natural capabilities.” The strength perspective is a great way to help the client realize their strong gualities. Another very important attribute that I incorporated from class that I used while working in the shelter was the aspect of cultural competence and diverse populations. Cultural competence refers to the process by which individuals and systems respond respectfully and effectively to people of all cultures, languages, classes, races, ethnic backgrounds, religions, and other diversity factors in a manner that recognizes, affirms, and values the worth of individuals, families, and communities and protects and preserves the dignity of each.

“Cultural competence is a set of congruent behaviors, attitudes, and policies that come together in a system or agency or among professionals and enable the system, agency, or professionals to work effectively in cross-cultural situations” (NAW, 2000b, p. 61). While working at the shelter I noticed that there were many different kinds of races and cultures there; whites, blacks, Hispanics, Muslims, Asians, etc. Every family living there was different in their own way. It made me realize that domestic violence is something very problematic that is happening to everyone. Domestic violence does not discriminate, it does not just affect a specific race or ethnicity it affects many different women and families all over the world. It can happen to anyone regardless of race, gender, religion, socio-economic level or sexual orientation. It can be even more complicated when a victim experiences further oppression from society as a whole, such as racial discrimination or homophobia, making it even more difficult to break the cycle of violence.

Practicing cultural competence and diversity is important because social workers should understand culture and its functions in human behavior and society, recognizing the strengths that exist in all cultures. According to the NASW code of ethics “Social workers should have a knowledge base of their clients’ cultures and be able to demonstrate competence in the provision of services that are sensitive to clients’ cultures and to differences among people and cultural groups. Social workers should obtain education about and seek to understand the nature of social diversity and oppression with respect to race, ethnicity, national origin, color, sex, sexual orientation, age, marital status, political belief, religion, and mental or physical disability.” By using cultural competence in assisting clients social workers will be able to expand choice and opportunity for all people, with special regard for vulnerable, disadvantaged, oppressed, and exploited people and groups, while promote conditions that encourage respect for cultural and social diversity.

Being able to get the opportunity to volunteer at the Family Violence Prevention Services shelter has been an amazing learning experience for me that I will not forget. It has taught to me to appreciate what I have while also helping me learn more about helping others using social work skills and being able to empathize with the client. I learned a lot about many things that we learned in class such as the strength perspective, empowerment, cultural competence and diversity. The time that I spent at the shelter helped me learn and grow as a person, student, and social worker; I will never forget this experience and will use it in the future to help others.