moocow in the city

one cow. many pastures.

October 2021

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S3E2: Join me at the SFBTA Conference

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Hi Everyone,

Welcome back to Dispatches from the Social Work Desk! 

I am getting super excited for the Solution Focused Brief Therapy Association’s annual conference coming up next month.

While my practice is now almost entirely Financial Social Work, what’s nice about Solution Focused Brief Therapy is that it can be applied to therapy, coaching, nutrition, nursing, medicine, banking, accounting, rugby (yes, really, I’m working with a referee in New Zealand right now on laying that groundwork), and – yes of course, Financial Social Work.

The heart of Solution Focused Brief Therapy, or coaching, as devised by Insoo Kim Berg and Steve DeSchazer is: where are you right now? Where do you want to be? What do you need to get there? What are the barriers? What have you done in similar situations in the past? If you haven’t had similar situations, what might work? When is the problem LESS of a problem (even if you’ve had 365 bad days, they’ve been 365 different days, and they aren’t all going to be equally bad). What made those days that were less bad, less bad? Do more of what’s working, stop doing what isn’t working.

In the application of Solution Focused practice to Financial Social Work, I’m happy that they – essentially – go hand in hand. While there are disagreements about what role the transtheoretical model of behavioral change plays in SF practice, it’s one of the driving forces behind Financial Social Work, and also Motivational Interviewing.

Solution Focused practice (for me) has always been the other side of the Motivation Interviewing, or MI coin: great, now that you’re motivated, what are we going to do about it? How do we take this opportunity to have that motivation also be therapeutic.

I’m excited, as always, to learn from my colleagues. See old friends (and make new ones) and of course learn and see the best in new research.

I’m particularly excited to announce that I’ll be giving a talk on the conference’s research day (Friday, November 12), to discuss how to involve the practitioner community of SFBT with the research world (and vice versa) and how to implement research within one’s own practice…doubly so, because this is essentially the heart of my doctoral work right now, and the main crux of the Doctor of Social Work (DSW) program at the University at Buffalo. So yes, please, I will happily accept a microphone and share my doctoral passion with anyone who wants to listen (I promise, it will be brief, and interesting).

As Insoo Kim Berg used to say: the difference between a Solution Focused Brief Therapist and a Solution Focused Brief Coach is that the coaches make more money (painfully true) – so whether you’re a therapist, a coach, a nutritionist, a financial social worker, or just someone who wants to find a way to integrate the Solution Focused philosophy into your work (architecture? design? cooking?) I encourage you to join us.

Please head over to the conference website www.SFBTAConference.org, and register today. Admission is donation/by suggestion/sliding scale, and the conference is going to be virtual this year (again) instead of Las Vegas because of this whole pandemic that we’re all still living in.

Now, it’s time to clean up my home office (in a solution focused way – yes you can be a solution focused cleaner!) so I can start my work week nice and fresh.

Today’s background music is by 42 Meisterwerke (ID 1619) by Lobo Loco courtesy of the Free Music Archive through a Creative Commons License. Check them out at FreeMusicArchive.org

Thank you for listening. Please tune in again next week for more. You can find me on social media as @SocialWorkDesk on all the platforms that you’d think to look at. I’ll see you next week with more; until then, make good choices. 

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S3E1: Welcome to Season 3

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Hi Everyone,

Welcome back to Dispatches from the Social Work Desk! Updated equipment, a (new and improved) home office setup…and about 100 different kinds of personal fires put out (you know, family members who needed brain surgery, loss of a beloved family pet, and all the other things that can throw us off track during these increasingly chaotic times).

Today we begin Season 3 of Dispatches From the Social Work Desk. Seasons are (now, at least) based on when the University at Buffalo begins its Fall Term. I find that, since 2002, I have been connected to UB’s calendar in some way or other, and what better marker on our journey of time than when the fall semester begins, Pumpkin Spice Latte’s are ready, and the leaves are changing colors to mark our seasons.

I figured today I would give you all a brief overview of where I’m at, with regard to my work and my research, and let you in on a bit of “what is implementation science.”

I continue to have my practice at the Community Behavioral Healthcare Center, though over the past year (one year this November) I have transitioned my case load largely from Mental Health and Substance Use, to a specialty practice: Financial Social Work. I see clients from both the Mental Health and SUD side of the agency, and I provide them with financial behavioral healthcare.

This means, I work with our clients to change how they relate (emotionally, and behaviorally) to finances: debt, spending, credit, saving, earning, and more. I work with all of our clients to change behaviors in order to reduce unnecessary/impulsive spending behaviors, and assist them in finding ways of reducing expenses while still living a more than austere life after we’ve stabilized their finances. I then work to empower clients to increase their income and savings (yes, even clients on SSI, and SSDI, and other government programs with means testing/restrictions). After our clients have stabilized their finances, increased their income, and assets, I then work with them to diversify their assets to empower them to achieve long term financial security (and hopefully to get off, and stay off, the system). It is exciting work. It is meaningful work. It is FUN work…and it combines my past history of work in accounting and finance, and my MBA with my MSW.

I am currently in the process of expanding our Financial Social Work program, with a lot of assistance from the Center for Financial Social Work, and its incredible founder and leader, Reeta Wolfsohn. I’m looking forward to beginning a Financial Social Work Residency program at my agency, to assist other clinicians in specializing in this field. More on that as it develops.

We are also in the middle of our fall term in my doctoral program, so I figured it would be a good time to share what on EARTH a DSW is, and what on EARTH I’m studying/going to do with it.

I’m a Doctor of Social Work student (that’s what the DSW is) at the University at Buffalo School of Social Work. In our DSW program (which, online, is advertised as a DSW in Social Welfare…which is equally non-informative) we study implementation science.

Implementation scientists work, on a very meta level, to serve as a bridge between the academic world (think, ivory towers), and the real world…where evidence based practice has to get translated into how agencies and clinicians actually work. Our goal is to take the average of 17 years (which is how long most research takes to filter out into the world) and reduce that number exponentially, to a matter of months. This means closing feedback loops, working with stakeholders and researchers, conducting our OWN research into implementation science and practice, and working to reduce close to two decades of time from publication to practice. 

In the end, the work that we’re doing in what is a relatively new field, will help agencies and individual practitioners implement  best practices in as close to real time as we can get. This means that the days of a researcher having a good idea, testing it on ONE demographic, and it taking 17 years to filter out and see if it can be used within other demographics…are over. It’s 2021. We have to be able to get meaningful research into the hands of those who need it in less time than it takes us to get to Mars right now (which, according to NASA, is 7 months). 

Implementation scientists and students are currently leading the way int his effort, and I’m proud to be in the second doctoral cohort of this program at UB as we define what this field will mean, and look like, within the lens and framework of Social Work values, and ethics.

Now, after what has been a ridiculous week, filled with shenanigans, I am going to finish assignment for class, and practice self-care.

Thank you for listening. Please tune in again nexts week for more. You can find me on social media as @SocialWorkDesk on all the platforms that you’d think to look. I’ll see you next week with more; until then, make good choices.