Social Workers

Social Workers

Social Workers

The volunteer visitors of the 1880s became, in the 1890s, social workers. They attended training programs to upgrade their skills and returned to their agencies to take leadership positions for a salary. They no longer saw themselves as providers of friendship or moral uplift, but instead extended to their clients a professional relationship that aspired to be both scientific and objective.
The early professional social workers also broadened the application of their new skills to include other types of charity work through expanding "casework" practice into child welfare institutions and juvenile courts. By the beginning of the 20th century, the volunteer friendly visitor of the early charity organizations had evolved into what we now identify as social casework.

Page updated 06 August 2007 by ROSSBRET