Results by title
46 books match the query 'Human Services'
A History of Occupational Health and Safety
From 1905 to the PresentMichelle Follette Turk
University of Nevada Press, 2018
A History of Occupational Health and Safety examines the work, hazards, and health and safety programs from the early building of the railroad through the construction of the Hoover Dam, chemical manufacturing during World War II, nuclear testing, and dense megaresort construction on the Las Vegas Strip. In doing so, this comprehensive chronicle reveals the long and unfortunate history of exposing workers, residents, tourists, and the environment to dangerous work—all while exposing the present and future to crises in the region. Complex interactions and beliefs among the actors involved are emphasized, as well as how the medical community interpreted and responded to the risks posed.
Few places in the United States contain this mixture of industrial and postindustrial sites, the Las Vegas area offers unique opportunities to evaluate American occupational health during the twentieth century, and reminds us all about the relevancy of protecting our workers.
A Mad Mess
Community Mental Health in CrisisOwen Whooley
University of Chicago Press, 2026
A sobering assessment of the systematic failures of mental health work.
The United States is in the midst of a mental health crisis that cannot be ignored. Its effects are visible in overcrowded emergency rooms, homeless encampments, and frequent encounters between police and people with serious mental illness. And yet, our attempts to support people with mental illness—from medical care to housing support to basic hygiene—seem to never take meaningful hold despite the tireless work of professionals who attempt to help people bring together the pieces of a life. The problem is not in any individual effort though; it’s in the many ways these programs fail to work together. For those with serious mental illness, and those who work to ameliorate it, there is no system. There is only mess.
In A Mad Mess, sociologist Owen Whooley uncovers the exasperating barriers, bureaucratic mismatches, and threadbare resources that have made a mess of what should be a supportive system. Set in Albuquerque, New Mexico—a city whose struggles echo those of communities nationwide—the book reveals the challenges mental health workers face daily, from tedious paperwork to occasional violence. Whooley follows workers across local outpatient service organizations, specialized police mental health units, and a psychiatric emergency department. Despite mostly good intentions and sometimes heroic efforts, he shows why this important work so often ends in failure.
Written with deep sympathy and unflinching honesty, A Mad Mess reveals how the lack of a cohesive mental health system obstructs critical care and places roadblocks before front-line mental health workers at every turn. Most critically, for those who suffer from severe mental illness, these setbacks are a constant reminder that the institutions charged with helping them have left them on their own.
Addicted to Rehab
Race, Gender, and Drugs in the Era of Mass IncarcerationMcKim, Allison
Rutgers University Press, 2017
Winner of the 2018 Book of the Year Award from the American Society of Criminology's Division on Women and Crime
After decades of the American “war on drugs” and relentless prison expansion, political officials are finally challenging mass incarceration. Many point to an apparently promising solution to reduce the prison population: addiction treatment.
In Addicted to Rehab, Bard College sociologist Allison McKim gives an in-depth and innovative ethnographic account of two such rehab programs for women, one located in the criminal justice system and one located in the private healthcare system—two very different ways of defining and treating addiction. McKim’s book shows how addiction rehab reflects the race, class, and gender politics of the punitive turn. As a result, addiction has become a racialized category that has reorganized the link between punishment and welfare provision. While reformers hope that treatment will offer an alternative to punishment and help women, McKim argues that the framework of addiction further stigmatizes criminalized women and undermines our capacity to challenge gendered subordination. Her study ultimately reveals a two-tiered system, bifurcated by race and class.
Administrative Burden
Policymaking by Other MeansPamela Herd
Russell Sage Foundation, 2018
Winner of the 2020 Outstanding Book Award Presented by the Public and Nonprofit Section of the National Academy of Management
Winner of the 2019 Louis Brownlow Book Award from the National Academy of Public Administration
Through in-depth case studies of federal programs and controversial legislation, the authors show that administrative burdens are the nuts-and-bolts of policy design. Regarding controversial issues such as voter enfranchisement or abortion rights, lawmakers often use administrative burdens to limit access to rights or services they oppose. For instance, legislators have implemented administrative burdens such as complicated registration requirements and strict voter-identification laws to suppress turnout of African American voters. Similarly, the right to an abortion is legally protected, but many states require women seeking abortions to comply with burdens such as mandatory waiting periods, ultrasounds, and scripted counseling. As Herd and Moynihan demonstrate, administrative burdens often disproportionately affect the disadvantaged who lack the resources to deal with the financial and psychological costs of navigating these obstacles.
However, policymakers have sometimes reduced administrative burdens or shifted them away from citizens and onto the government. One example is Social Security, which early administrators of the program implemented in the 1930s with the goal of minimizing burdens for beneficiaries. As a result, the take-up rate is about 100 percent because the Social Security Administration keeps track of peoples’ earnings for them, automatically calculates benefits and eligibility, and simply requires an easy online enrollment or visiting one of 1,200 field offices. Making more programs and public services operate this efficiently, the authors argue, requires adoption of a nonpartisan, evidence-based metric for determining when and how to institute administrative burdens, with a bias toward reducing them. By ensuring that the public’s interaction with government is no more onerous than it need be, policymakers and administrators can reduce inequality, boost civic engagement, and build an efficient state that works for all citizens.
An American Social Worker in Italy
Jean Charnley
University of Minnesota Press, 1961
An American Social Worker in Italy was first published in 1961. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
Mrs. Charnley, an American social worker, spent six months in Italy on a Fulbright grant as a consultant to Italian child welfare agencies and schools of social work. Here, in diary form, she tells of her experiences during those months when she struggled to teach American social work principles to her Italian colleagues. The task was complicated not only by the need to communicate in a newly learned tongue but also by the necessity to tailor American casework philosophies to a vastly different culture. The story abounds in humor and pathos and, at the same time, offers rich information about Italy, its people, and its child-care methods and institutions.
Mrs. Charnley points out that one Italian child in ten spends his first seventeen years in an institution. The nation's laws for the protection of children date back to the Caesars; even the most progressive of the social workers she met hoped for reforms only in terms of decades or centuries. Against this background, the situations in which she found herself were sometimes frustrating, often comic, always challenging. Her determination to help Italy's half-million institutionalized children took her behind the doors of many orphanages and convents, into close contact with the children and the nuns and priests who cared for them. She studied the records of social agencies, analyzed problems with their staffs, and lectured at social work schools.
Bad Souls
Madness and Responsibility in Modern GreeceElizabeth Anne Davis
Duke University Press, 2012
Building a House in Heaven
Pious Neoliberalism and Islamic Charity in EgyptMona Atia
University of Minnesota Press, 2013
Charity is an economic act. This premise underlies a societal transformation—the merging of religious and capitalist impulses that Mona Atia calls “pious neoliberalism.” Though the phenomenon spans religious lines, Atia makes the connection between Islam and capitalism to examine the surprising relations between charity and the economy, the state, and religion in the transition from Mubarak-era Egypt.
Mapping the landscape of charity and development in Egypt, Building a House in Heaven reveals the factors that changed the nature of Egyptian charitable practices—the state’s intervention in social care and religion, an Islamic revival, intensified economic pressures on the poor, and the subsequent emergence of the private sector as a critical actor in development. She shows how, when individuals from Egypt’s private sector felt it necessary to address poverty, they sought to make Islamic charities work as engines of development, a practice that changed the function of charity from distributing goods to empowering the poor. Drawing on interviews with key players, Atia explores the geography of Islamic charities through multiple neighborhoods, ideologies, sources of funding, projects, and wide social networks. Her work shifts between absorbing ethnographic stories of specific organizations and reflections on the patterns that appear across the sector.
An enlightening look at the simultaneous neoliberalization of Islamic charity work and Islamization of neoliberal development, the book also offers an insightful analysis of the political and socioeconomic movements leading up to the uprisings that ended Mubarak’s rule and that amplified the importance of not only the Muslim Brotherhood but also the broader forces of Islamic piety and charity.
Care and Capitalism in the Twentieth Century
Kirsten Swinth and Sarah Knott, editors
Duke University Press, 2027
Civil War, Civil Peace
Helen Yanacopulos
Ohio University Press, 2006
When a cease-fire is arranged, aid workers, military personnel, diplomats, and others pour in from the United States, Europe, and international agencies. Outside help is essential after a war, but too often, well-intentioned interveners do more harm than good. A half of civil wars have resumed after failed peace agreements.
Each war is different, and there can be no intervention handbook or best practices guide. Aimed at practitioners and policy makers, and essential reading for students of war, humanitarian intervention, peace building, and development, Civil War, Civil Peace provides a comprehensive examination of how interventions can be improved through a better understanding of the roots of war and of the grievances and interests that fueled the war.
Collaborating for Change
A Participatory Action Research CasebookSusan D. Greenbaum
Rutgers University Press, 2020
Communities of Health Care Justice
Galarneau, Charlene
Rutgers University Press, 2016
Community Organizing and Community Building for Health and Social Equity, 4th edition
Meredith Minkler and Patricia Wakimoto
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Many of the book’s contributors are leaders in their academic fields, from public health and social work, to community psychology and urban and regional planning, and to social and political science. One author was the 44th president of the United States, himself a former community organizer in Chicago, who reflects on his earlier vocation and its importance. Other contributors are inspiring community leaders whose work on-the-ground and in partnership with us “outsiders” highlights both the power of collaboration, and the cultural humility and other skills required to do it well.
Throughout this book, and particularly in the case studies and examples shared, the role of context is critical, and never far from view. Included here most recently are the horrific and continuing toll of the COVID-19 pandemic, and a long overdue, yet still greatly circumscribed, “national reckoning with systemic racism,” in the aftermath of the brutal police killing of yet another unarmed Black person, and then another and another, seemingly without end. In many chapters, the authors highlight different facets of the Black Lives Matter movement that took on new life across the country and the world in response to these atrocities. In other chapters, the existential threat of climate change and grave threats to democracy also are underscored.
View the Table of Contents and introductory text for the supplementary instructor resources. (https://d3tto5i5w9ogdd.cloudfront.net/wp-content/uploads/2022/02/04143046/9781978832176_optimized_sampler.pdf)
Supplementary instructor resources are available on request: https://www.rutgersuniversitypress.org/communityorganizing
Community Organizing and Community Building for Health and Welfare
Edited by Meredith Minkler
Rutgers University Press, 2012
The third edition of Community Organizing and Community Building for Health and Welfare provides new and more established ways to approach community building and organizing, from collaborating with communities on assessment and issue selection to using the power of coalition building, media advocacy, and social media to enhance the effectiveness of such work.
With a strong emphasis on cultural relevance and humility, this collection offers a wealth of case studies in areas ranging from childhood obesity to immigrant worker rights to health care reform. A "tool kit" of appendixes includes guidelines for assessing coalition effectiveness, exercises for critical reflection on our own power and privilege, and training tools such as "policy bingo." From former organizer and now President Barack Obama to academics and professionals in the fields of public health, social work, urban planning, and community psychology, the book offers a comprehensive vision and on-the-ground examples of the many ways community building and organizing can help us address some of the most intractable health and social problems of our times.
Democracy's Hidden Heroes
Fitting Policy to People and PlaceDavid C. Campbell
Temple University Press, 2024
David Campbell recounts compelling stories of the workarounds, sidesteps, informal agreements, and grantor–grantee negotiations that help policy initiatives succeed as intended. The settings include schools, human services departments, workforce development agencies, and community-based organizations. He explains why it is difficult, though necessary, to translate locally attuned implementation dynamics into accountability metrics for distant funders.
Drawing on 2,000 interviews, Democracy’s Hidden Heroes is the culmination of decades spent talking to people who must reconcile bureaucratic and community cultures. Campbell’s grounded approach and balanced perspective bring fresh insights to the analysis of policy implementation, public management, and results accountability, while offering both cautionary advice and a hopeful prognosis.
Dignity and Health
Nora Jacobson
Vanderbilt University Press, 2012
Dignity and Health examines the processes and structures of dignity violation and promotion, traces their consequences for individual and collective health, and uses the model developed to imagine how we might reform our systems of health and social care.
With its focus on the dignity experiences of those often excluded from the mainstream--people who are poor, or homeless, or dealing with mental health problems--as well as on vulnerabilities like age or sickness or unemployment that threaten to make us all feel "less than," Dignity and Health recognizes dignity as a moral matter embedded in the choices we make every day.
Dignity and Health
Nora Jacobson
Vanderbilt University Press, 2012
Dignity and Health examines the processes and structures of dignity violation and promotion, traces their consequences for individual and collective health, and uses the model developed to imagine how we might reform our systems of health and social care.
With its focus on the dignity experiences of those often excluded from the mainstream--people who are poor, or homeless, or dealing with mental health problems--as well as on vulnerabilities like age or sickness or unemployment that threaten to make us all feel "less than," Dignity and Health recognizes dignity as a moral matter embedded in the choices we make every day.
Fighting for Public Services
Better Lives, A Better WorldFritz Keller and Andreas Hoferl
Pluto Press, 2008
It provides a full account of trade union history and activism across the public sector worldwide. Examining the major political events of the 20th century, the book shows what challenges they presented to the PSI and its major unions. It shows how the public sector responded to the two World Wars, the rise of fascism, the Cold war, and the independence struggles in the former colonies.
It also provides a comprehensive account of the evolution of public service provision, from public health to policing, water, pensions, security and culture. It includes many examples of how the recent liberalization and privatization of public services has failed to secure efficiency and equity.
First, Do No Harm
Power, Oppression, and Violence in HealthcareEdited by Nancy L. Diekelmann
University of Wisconsin Press, 2002
First, Do No Harm shows how health care professionals, with the best intentions of providing excellent, holistic health care, can nonetheless perpetuate violence against vulnerable patients. The essays investigate the need to rethink contemporary healthcare practices in ways that can bring the art and science of medicine back into sorely needed balance.
These ground-breaking studies by noted scholars question commonly held assumptions in contemporary healthcare that underlie oppressive power dynamics and even violence for patients and their families. The contributors discuss such topics as women and violence, life-support technologies, and healthcare professionals’ own experiences as patients. First, Do No Harm opens the discourse for reaching new understandings, from reassessing the meaning of "quality of life" to questioning the appropriateness of the very language used by healthcare professionals. It will be welcomed by healthcare workers and by scholars in nursing, medicine, and the allied health sciences.
Food for Thought
Understanding Older Food InsecurityColleen M. Heflin
Russell Sage Foundation, 2025
Through analysis of national data sets and interviews with lower income older adults, Heflin and Harrington Meyer describe why many older adults do not have enough money to afford food and other essentials. As a result of chronic economic disadvantage, food insecure older adults are often forced to make budget trade-offs between food and other expenses. In these trade-offs, food typically ranks below housing and energy costs and competes with other household bills, such as medical costs, transportation, and phone and internet coverage. While finances play a large role, nonfinancial factors, such as poor physical, cognitive, and mental health, access to healthy food, and transportation challenges, also contribute to food insecurity in old age. In the face of these difficulties, food insecure older adults may go hungry, skip meals, or eat unhealthy foods to help make ends meet.
While SNAP and community-based programs, such as food pantries and home delivered meals, are intended to help address the issue of food insecurity, they are typically inadequate to address the needs of food insecure older adults. SNAP has enrollment and maintenance procedures that are particularly difficult for older adults to navigate, pays out an insufficient amount of money to cover food costs, and varies greatly by state. Availability of community programs varies by municipality, often lacks nutritious foods that are complementary to health conditions common among older adults, and can be difficult to access due to a lack of reliable transportation, disability, or cost. Heflin and Harrington Meyer advocate for addressing all the issues that increase older adults’ risk of food insecurity, not just financial barriers. They suggest updating food insecurity screening tools to include these factors, increasing SNAP benefits and income support for older adults, and other policies to help combat food insecurity in older adults.
Food for Thought highlights the increasingly important issue of food insecurity in old age and lays bare the overlooked challenges faced by food insecure older adults.
Gambling With Lives
A History of Occupational Health in Greater Las VegasMichelle Follette Turk
University of Nevada Press, 2020
A History of Occupational Health and Safety examines the work, hazards, and health and safety programs from the early building of the railroad through the construction of the Hoover Dam, chemical manufacturing during World War II, nuclear testing, and dense megaresort construction on the Las Vegas Strip. In doing so, this comprehensive chronicle reveals the long and unfortunate history of exposing workers, residents, tourists, and the environment to dangerous work—all while exposing the present and future to crises in the region. Complex interactions and beliefs among the actors involved are emphasized, as well as how the medical community interpreted and responded to the risks posed.
Few places in the United States contain this mixture of industrial and postindustrial sites, the Las Vegas area offers unique opportunities to evaluate American occupational health during the twentieth century, and reminds us all about the relevancy of protecting our workers.
Growing Old on the Margins
Abandonment, Care, Death, Intimacy, and Possibility in Lima, PeruMagdalena Zegarra Chiappori
Rutgers University Press, 2027
Growing Old on the Margins is a moving portrait of aging at the edge of social life. Set in a state-run shelter for older adults in urban Lima, Peru, the book traces the everyday lives of men and women who have been left behind by family, institutions, and the promises of care. Based on more than two years of close ethnographic engagement, it follows residents as they navigate loneliness, illness, intimacy, and the quiet anticipation of death. Through small gestures—shared silences, requests for affection, moments of tenderness and conflict—the book reveals how people strive to remain present in a world that offers them little reason to hope. Care appears here not as a simple act of kindness, but as a fragile and uneven practice, shaped by scarcity, power, and moral ambiguity. Attentive to suffering without romanticizing it, Growing Old on the Margins reflects on what it means to age, endure, and remain human when one’s life is no longer considered worthy of attention.
Handbook for In-Service Training in Human Services
William Crimando
Southern Illinois University Press, 1988
A practical "how-to" workbook that outlines a plan for the design and implementation of staff in-service training programs for human service agencies and facilities.
Crimando and Riggar have made every effort to guarantee the usefulness of this text to practitioners, instructors, and students. This is a working book designed to assist trainers as they acquire the knowledge and skills needed to provide thorough, systematic in-service training that will enhance human service endeavors.
The authors have organized the nineteen chapters into four parts that treat significant steps in the training-program design process. These include analyzing problems that require training solutions; developing a proposal; writing a plan of action for training; and evaluating a program. Each of the chapters combines text, examples, exercises, and supplementary readings to foster a full appreciation of the process involved. Even those topics frequently overlooked or disregarded are included: budgeting program time and financial resources, obtaining administrative commitment, and transferring and maintaining skills in the work setting.
Handbook for Management of Human Service Agencies
T.F. Riggar and R.E. Matkin
Southern Illinois University Press, 1986
A basic guide for individuals responsible for developing and/or operating comprehensive or specialized human service programs.
Drawing on more than a decade of classroom experience and development and incorporating standards from the Commission on Accreditation of Rehabilitation Facilities (1985 Edition), Riggar and Matkin have created a management tool that is as practical for human service providers as it is for students. Here is the fundamental management knowledge required to establish or manage all types of human service programs and facilities.
The text is organized into 23 sections that describe tasks ranging from constructing mission statements and admission criteria to developing start-up budgets and allocating space for both direct and indirect services. Each section provides definitions and guidelines, practical examples, exercises, and selected references. While the focus is on the practices of the private not-for-profit sector, those working in a profit-oriented setting will find many of the sections and exercises to be valuable aids for developing, operating, and maintaining successful programs.
Individual and Social Responsibility
Child Care, Education, Medical Care, and Long-Term Care in AmericaEdited by Victor R. Fuchs
University of Chicago Press, 1995
Four in-depth studies of human-service sectors—child care, education, medical care, and long-term care for the elderly—are followed by six cross-sector studies that stimulate new ways of thinking about human services through the application of economic theory, institutional analysis, and the history of social policy.
The contributors include Kenneth J. Arrow, Martin Feldstein, Victor Fuchs, Alan M. Garber, Eric A. Hanushek, Christopher Jencks, Seymour Martin Lipset, Glenn Loury, Roger G. Noll, Paul M. Romer, Amartya Sen, and Theda Skocpol.
This timely study sheds important light on the tension between individual and social responsibility, and will appeal to economists and other social scientists and policymakers concerned with social policy issues.
Intimate Industries
Restructuring (Im)Material Labor in AsiaRhacel Parreñas, Hung Cam Thai and Rachel Silvey, special issue editors
Duke University Press, 0
This issue addresses how laborers within intimate industries—those who do interpersonal work that tends to the sexual, bodily, health, hygiene, or care needs of individuals—are shaping Asia’s growing role in the global economy. The contributors investigate how intimate industries support relational connections for consumers while disrupting laborers’ relationships, as in the case of migrants who perform intimate labor away from their families and communities of origin. The articles collected here include examinations of such trade-offs and their complex meanings and implications for the workers. The authors explore these social processes through the lens of industries that organize, enable, or delimit the trade in domestic labor, marriage migration, companionship and romance, sex work, pornographic performance, surrogate mothering and ova donation, and cosmetics sales. This issue puts people, as embodied subjects, back into narratives of economic change and offers a perspective on globalization from below.
Contributors: Danièle Bélanger, Hae Yeon Choo, Nicole Constable, Daisy Deomampo, Akhil Gupta, Chaitanya Lakkimsetti, Pei-Chia Lan, Purnima Mankekar, Eileen Otis, Juno Salazar Parreñas, Rhacel Parreñas, Sharmila Rudrappa, Celine Parreñas Shimizu, Rachel Silvey, Hung Cam Thai, Leslie Wang
Just Care
Messy Entanglements of Disability, Dependency, and DesireAkemi Nishida
Temple University Press, 2022
Just Care is Akemi Nishida’s thoughtful examination of care injustice and social justice enabled through care. The current neoliberal political economy has turned care into a business opportunity for the healthcare industrial complex and a mechanism of social oppression and control. Nishida analyzes the challenges people negotiate whether they are situated as caregivers, receivers, or both. Also illuminated is how people with disabilities come together to assemble community care collectives and bed activism (resistance and visions emerging from the space of bed) to reimagine care as a key element for social change.
The structure of care, Nishida writes, is deeply embedded in and embodies the cruel social order—based on disability, race, gender, migration status, and wealth—that determines who survives or deteriorates. Simultaneously, many marginalized communities treat care as the foundation of activism. Using interviews, focus groups, and participant observation with care workers and people with disabilities, Just Care looks into lives unfolding in the assemblage of Medicaid long-term care programs, community-based care collectives, and bed activism. Just Care identifies what care does, and asks: How can we activate care justice or just care where people feel cared affirmatively and care being used for the wellbeing of community and for just world making?
Lesson Plans
The Institutional Demands of Becoming a TeacherEveritt, Judson G.
Rutgers University Press, 2017
In Lesson Plans, Judson G. Everitt takes readers into the everyday worlds of teacher training, and reveals the complexities and dilemmas teacher candidates confront as they learn how to perform a job that many people assume anybody can do. Using rich qualitative data, Everitt analyzes how people make sense of their prospective jobs as teachers, and how their introduction to this profession is shaped by the institutionalized rules and practices of higher education, K-12 education, and gender. Trained to constantly adapt to various contingencies that routinely arise in schools and classrooms, teacher candidates learn that they must continually try to reconcile the competing expectations of their jobs to meet students’ needs in an era of accountability. Lesson Plans reveals how institutions shape the ways we produce teachers, and how new teachers make sense of the multiple and complicated demands they face in their efforts to educate students.
Managing Contracted Services in the Nonprofit Agency
Administrative, Ethical, and Political IssuesSusan R. Bernstein, foreword by Roger A. Lohmann
Temple University Press, 1991
Through interviews conducted with nonprofit agency managers in the New York City metropolitan area, Susan Bernstein vividly describes their experiences with "contracting out," the principal way that the "reluctant" American welfare state has of providing public services through the private sector. The agency administrators look upon this as a nightmarish game and their stories illuminate how welfare state mechanisms work in practice as well as the tangled nature of bureaucracies Bernstein illustrates and analyzes these administrators’ strategies for managing the administrative, ethical, and political issues of contracted services. Managing Contracted Services is one of the first books to examine how administrators manage contracted services in a bureaucratic and political environment.
Minimum Wages in Central and Eastern Europe
From Protection to DestitutionGuy Standing
Central European University Press, 1995
Nursing with a Message
Public Health Demonstration Projects in New York CityD'Antonio, Patricia
Rutgers University Press, 2017
This book is also freely available online as an open access digital edition.
Download the open access ebook here.
Powerless
The People's Struggle for EnergyDiana Hernández
Russell Sage Foundation, 2025
Approximately one in ten households in the U.S. are energy insecure and four in ten are at risk for energy insecurity. These statistics alone do not convey the acute pain of utility shutoffs, or the relentless toll of chronic energy hardships marked by difficult choices and harsh living conditions. Drawing on survey data and interviews with one hundred energy-insecure individuals and families, Hernández and Laird detail the experience of energy insecurity. Individuals and families suffering from energy insecurity endure economic hardships, such as difficulty paying utility bills, utility debt, and disconnection from utility services. They also struggle with physical challenges, such as poor housing conditions and poor or dysfunctional heating and cooling systems. They are often forced to make difficult choices about what bills to pay. These decisions are sometimes referred to as “heat or eat?” choices, as families cannot afford to pay for heating and food at the same time. Energy insecure individuals and families employ a variety of strategies to keep energy costs down to avoid having to make these hard choices. This includes deliberate underconsumption of energy, enduring physical discomfort, and using dangerous alternatives such as open flames, ovens, or space heaters to try to maintain a comfortable temperature in their home. To be energy insecure is to suffer. Despite the heavy toll of energy insecurity, most people confront these difficulties behind closed doors, believing it is a private matter. Thus, the enormous social crisis of energy insecurity goes unnoticed.
Hernández and Laird argue that household energy is a basic human right and detail policies and practices that would expand access to consistent, safe, clean, and affordable energy. Their proposals include improving the current energy safety net, which is limited and often does not serve the most energy insecure due to stringent program requirements and administrative burdens. They also suggest redesigning rates to accommodate income, promoting enrollment and expansion of discount programs, reforming utility disconnection policies, improving energy literacy, and ensuring an equitable shift to renewable energy resources.
Powerless creates a comprehensive picture of the complex social and environmental issue of energy insecurity and shows how energy equity is not just an aspiration but an achievable reality.
Preventing Child Maltreatment in the U.S.
American Indian and Alaska Native PerspectivesRoyleen J Ross
Rutgers University Press, 2022
This book is part of a concentrated series of books that examines child maltreatment across minoritized, cultural groups.Specifically, this volume addresses American Indian and Alaska Native populations. However, in an effort to contextualize the experiences of 574 federally recognized tribes and 50+ state recognized tribes, as well as villages, the authors focus on populations within rural and remote regions and discuss the experiences of some tribal communities throughout US history. It should be noted that established research has primarily drawn attention to the pervasive problems impacting Indigenous individuals, families, and communities. Aligned with an attempt to adhere to a decolonizing praxis, the authors share information in a strength-based framework for the Indigenous communities discussed within the text. The authors review federally funded programs (prevention, intervention, and treatment) that have been adapted for tribal communities (e.g., Safecare) and include cultural teachings that address child maltreatment. The intention of this book is to inform researchers, practitioners, policy makers, and advocates about the current state of child maltreatment from an Indigenous perspective.
Preventing Child Maltreatment in the U.S.
Multicultural ConsiderationsMilton A Fuentes
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Preventing Child Maltreatment in the U.S.
The Black Community PerspectiveMelissa Phillips
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Preventing Child Maltreatment in the U.S.
The Latinx Community PerspectiveEsther J. Calzada
Rutgers University Press, 2022
Problems of Administration in Social Work
Pierce Atwater
University of Minnesota Press, 1940
Problems of Administration in Social Work was first published in 1940. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.
RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Anti-poverty Policy Initiatives for the United StatesLawrence M. Berger
Russell Sage Foundation, 2018
Over 40 million Americans live in poverty with limited opportunities for upward mobility. With an economy characterized by large numbers of unstable and low-wage jobs, a fraying social safety net, and stagnant wages, what public policy reforms might increase the number of low-income families and individuals escaping poverty? This special double issue of RSF, edited by poverty researchers Lawrence M. Berger, Maria Cancian, and Katherine A. Magnuson, includes many innovative, evidence-based anti-poverty policy proposals crafted by leading social science researchers and policy analysts.
The first issue highlights initiatives that restructure tax and transfer programs to extend greater support to low-income families, regardless of work status. H. Luke Shaefer and colleagues would replace the current child tax credit and child tax exemption in the federal income tax with an unconditional universal child allowance. They estimate that this would reduce child poverty by about 40 percent. Maria Cancian and Daniel Meyer propose a new child support initiative that institutes a guaranteed minimum monthly support payment for every child living with a single parent, using public funds to bridge the gap when that amount exceeds what the noncustodial parent can reasonably pay. Sara Kimberlin and colleagues propose a renter’s tax credit in the federal income tax for poor households facing increasing rental costs that would benefit 70 percent of renters struggling with high rents.
The second issue analyzes policies that would reduce the extent of low-wage work by boosting education, training, and access to better jobs. Teresa Eckrich Sommer and colleagues propose expanding the Head Start program to combine parental education, job training, and employment opportunities along with existing early childhood education programs to better serve the needs of both parents and children. Mark Paul and colleagues propose a federal jobs guarantee of full-time employment, at a living wage and with benefits, for all adults seeking work. Diana Strumbos and colleagues propose a national community college program, based on a successful model used by the City University of New York, to provide disadvantaged students who enroll full-time with advising, academic, career, and financial supports.
Together, the policies proposed in this double issue provide an evidence-based blueprint for anti-poverty reforms that would benefit millions of people in need.
RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Three Decades Since 'Making Ends Meet': What We Know about How Single Mothers Survive TodayElizabeth O. Ananat
Russell Sage Foundation, 2026
In their seminal 1995 book Making Ends Meet: How Low-Income Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Employment, Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein laid bare the strategies and challenges of low-income single mothers who were struggling to provide for their families. Even in an era when cash welfare was a federal entitlement, these women struggled to get by. In the thirty years since the book’s publication, many single parents wrestle with volatility and precarious resources from work, informal and formal supports. In this double issue of RSF, economist Elizabeth O. Ananat, political scientist and public policy scholar Carolyn Y. Barnes, sociologists Sandra K. Danziger and Kathryn Edin, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how the policy landscape has changed since welfare reform and how it impacts low-income single mothers’ ability to make ends meet today.
Issue 1 has 8 articles that examine how the traditional safety net has evolved and new supports that have been developed since Making Ends Meet. For example, Sarah K. Bruch and colleagues assess changes to the social safety net since welfare reform in the 1990s and find that benefits have become more exclusive, have more constraints, and are less generous. Kelley Fong and Nora McCarthy reveal that, in an attempt to decrease child maltreatment, the child welfare system increasingly provides material resources to system-involved parents, including in-kind donations and assistance accessing childcare. However, parents often avoid obtaining resources through the system because it opens them up to increased state surveillance. Heather D. Hill and colleagues show that access to paid family and medical leave (PFML) varies greatly for single mothers, with two-thirds of single mothers living in states without PMFL. For those who live in states with PFML, the accessibility and generosity of benefits vary greatly.
Issue 2 has 5 articles that look at lessons that can be learned from COVID Era policies, how single mothers currently try to make ends meet, and men’s contributions to families. For example, Natasha V. Pilkauskas and Kevin Bruey find that low-income single mothers, with and without employment, utilize a variety of public and private resources to make ends meet. Despite this, both groups face high levels of material hardship, including food and housing insecurity. Hope Harvey examines how members of doubled up households understand their economic and social relationships and reveals that there are often disagreements about shared resources, such as money and food. However, it is not just the precise contributions that cause conflict, but how the exchanges are interpreted within the context of household members’ relationships. Allison Dwyer Emory and colleagues show that nonresident fathers often have trouble making ends meet themselves and are unable to make up for the loss of cash support post-welfare reform.
This double issue of RSF showcases the persistence of precarity that low-income families face since Making Ends Meet.
Note: This copy refers to both issues of the journal double issue.
RSF
The Russell Sage Foundation Journal of the Social Sciences: Three Decades Since 'Making Ends Meet': What We Know about How Single Mothers Survive TodayElizabeth O. Ananat
Russell Sage Foundation, 2026
In their seminal 1995 book Making Ends Meet: How Low-Income Single Mothers Survive Welfare and Low-Wage Employment, Kathryn Edin and Laura Lein laid bare the strategies and challenges of low-income single mothers who were struggling to provide for their families. Even in an era when cash welfare was a federal entitlement, these women struggled to get by. In the thirty years since the book’s publication, many single parents wrestle with volatility and precarious resources from work, informal and formal supports. In this double issue of RSF, economist Elizabeth O. Ananat, political scientist and public policy scholar Carolyn Y. Barnes, sociologists Sandra K. Danziger and Kathryn Edin, and an interdisciplinary group of contributors examine how the policy landscape has changed since welfare reform and how it impacts low-income single mothers’ ability to make ends meet today.
Issue 1 has 8 articles that examine how the traditional safety net has evolved and new supports that have been developed since Making Ends Meet. For example, Sarah K. Bruch and colleagues assess changes to the social safety net since welfare reform in the 1990s and find that benefits have become more exclusive, have more constraints, and are less generous. Kelley Fong and Nora McCarthy reveal that, in an attempt to decrease child maltreatment, the child welfare system increasingly provides material resources to system-involved parents, including in-kind donations and assistance accessing childcare. However, parents often avoid obtaining resources through the system because it opens them up to increased state surveillance. Heather D. Hill and colleagues show that access to paid family and medical leave (PFML) varies greatly for single mothers, with two-thirds of single mothers living in states without PMFL. For those who live in states with PFML, the accessibility and generosity of benefits vary greatly.
Issue 2 has 5 articles that look at lessons that can be learned from COVID Era policies, how single mothers currently try to make ends meet, and men’s contributions to families. For example, Natasha V. Pilkauskas and Kevin Bruey find that low-income single mothers, with and without employment, utilize a variety of public and private resources to make ends meet. Despite this, both groups face high levels of material hardship, including food and housing insecurity. Hope Harvey examines how members of doubled up households understand their economic and social relationships and reveals that there are often disagreements about shared resources, such as money and food. However, it is not just the precise contributions that cause conflict, but how the exchanges are interpreted within the context of household members’ relationships. Allison Dwyer Emory and colleagues show that nonresident fathers often have trouble making ends meet themselves and are unable to make up for the loss of cash support post-welfare reform.
This double issue of RSF showcases the persistence of precarity that low-income families face since Making Ends Meet.
Note: This copy refers to both issues of the journal double issue.
The Art of Child Placement
Jean Charnley
University of Minnesota Press, 1955
The Fundamental Institution
Poverty, Social Welfare, and Agriculture in American Poor FarmsMegan Birk
University of Illinois Press, 2022
In-depth and innovative, The Fundamental Institution offers an overdue portrait of rural social welfare in the United States.
The Housing Lottery
How Scarcity Drives America’s Rental Assistance PoliciesBrian J. McCabe
University of Chicago Press, 2026
How scarcity shapes nearly every aspect of our rental assistance programs, including the Housing Choice Voucher program.
It’s no secret that the United States is experiencing a housing crisis. While the cost of rental housing has soared since 2000, the median household income has barely changed. The Housing Choice Voucher program is America’s largest rental assistance program, but most households that are eligible for assistance simply cannot get access to it. Without enough resources to serve every eligible household in their communities, public housing agencies keep waiting lists, run lotteries, and claw back vouchers from households that are unable to meet the demands of the housing market. Despite the enormous benefits that come from affordable housing, it’s simply out of reach for most renters in need.
In The Housing Lottery, sociologist Brian J. McCabe takes readers to the frontlines of these housing agencies to understand how scarcity shapes nearly every aspect of the program. Following the bureaucrats charged with making these decisions about allocating housing resources, McCabe shows how decisions and regulations resulting from scarcity have enormous consequences. He presents extensive evidence about the importance of rental assistance for lifting households out of poverty and creating economic opportunity. To improve housing assistance as a public resource and to combat housing insecurity and its negative effects, McCabe argues for a more inclusive, expansive approach to federal housing policy.
Therapeutic Nations
Healing in an Age of Indigenous Human RightsDian Million
University of Arizona Press, 2013
Million contends that nation-state relations are influenced by a theory of trauma ascendant with the rise of neoliberalism. Such use of trauma theory regarding human rights corresponds to a therapeutic narrative by Western governments negotiating with Indigenous nations as they seek self-determination.
Focusing on Canada and drawing comparisons with the United States and Australia, Million brings a genealogical understanding of trauma against a historical filter. Illustrating how Indigenous people are positioned differently in Canada, Australia, and the United States in their articulation of trauma, the author particularly addresses the violence against women as a language within a greater politic. The book introduces an Indigenous feminist critique of this violence against the medicalized framework of addressing trauma and looks to the larger goals of decolonization. Noting the influence of humanitarian psychiatry, Million goes on to confront the implications of simply dismissing Indigenous healing and storytelling traditions.
Therapeutic Nations is the first book to demonstrate affect and trauma’s wide-ranging historical origins in an Indigenous setting, offering insights into community healing programs. The author’s theoretical sophistication and original research make the book relevant across a range of disciplines as it challenges key concepts of American Indian and Indigenous studies.
Twenty Years at Hull-House
Jane Addams, with Autobiographical Notes. Introduction and Notes by James Hurt.
University of Illinois Press, 1990
Whither Opportunity?
Rising Inequality, Schools, and Children's Life ChancesGreg J. Duncan
Russell Sage Foundation, 2012
Widows and Orphans First
The Family Economy and Social Welfare Policy, 1880-1939S. J. Kleinberg
University of Illinois Press, 2005
The experiences of widows and their children during the Progressive Era and the New Deal depended on differences in local economies and values. How did these widely varied experiences impact the origins of the welfare state?
S. J. Kleinberg delves into the question by comparing widows' lives in three industrial cities with differing economic, ethnic, and racial bases. Government in Fall River, Massachusetts, saw employment as a solution to widows' poverty and as a result drastically limited public charity. In Pittsburgh, widows received sympathetic treatment. Few jobs existed for them or their children; indeed, the jobs for men were concentrated in "widowmaking" industries like steel and railroading. With a large African American population and a diverse economy that relied on inexpensive child and female labor, Baltimore limited funds for public services. African Americans adapted by establishing their own charitable institutions.
A fascinating comparative study, Widows and Orphans First offers a one-of-a-kind look at social welfare policy for widows and the role of children in society during a pivotal time in American history.