Fundraising Priorities

Social Work donors Rick Delaney (middle right), with his parents Sally and Bob Delaney, and daughters Sean and Anna, gather outside the Faculty Club before the College of Social Work Scholarship Luncheon.

The areas of support

The College currently has several areas of faculty expertise.  These strengths will be fortified through the establishment of an endowed faculty chair in one or more of these areas:

• Gerontology
• Families and children
• Behavioral Health (substance abuse, health and mental health)

Scholarships
Because all social work students, both undergraduate and Masters, must complete field internship placements (most of which are unpaid), scholarship support is particularly critical to our College because they have less time to work than other students.  While we are able to make partial awards to a small percentage of our students, most must take large loans and work part-time jobs to pay tuition and fees.  Further, educational debt is particularly difficult for our students because of the low salaries earned by many of our graduates’ when they leave school; first employment after their professional education is in the low $30,000 range.  

One of the goals of the College is to establish a large number of scholarships which will allow tuition support for more students, as well as a series of grants to a number of students from a single source.

Dean’s discretionary funds
The College currently does not have an endowment for the dean’s discretionary spending.  One of the goals of the Campaign will be to endow The Dean’s Innovation Fund, creating a pool of ongoing income for the creative advancement of teaching, research, and community partnerships.  Further, income from this fund will support faculty travel to national conferences, seed grants for innovative curriculum development, provide incentives to learn new teaching techniques, and research faculty release time for interactive community projects, among other endeavors.

Programmatic support
A center for social work research (including an Intervention Research Institute and the Community Intervention Research and Evaluation Laboratory) will become the heart of research and evaluation of social work practice at The Ohio State University.  

Field education is essential to the social work learning experience.  One of our goals will be to create sustainable systems with partnering agencies, as well as the establishment of the field unit model.  To this end, we will seek funding to provide stipend support to students as well as financial incentives to our agency partners.

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