Committee Updates:
Rural Task Force:
NASW Nv. Rural Task Force is actively seeking additional members! The task force formed in early 2020 with a mission to engage social work professionals that are living or working in the rural areas of the state in order to identify their unique needs, increase chapter support, make recommendations to the NASW Nevada Board, and facilitate communication with colleagues that are in the urban areas as well as our community partners.
In addition to the opportunity to network and engage with social workers throughout the state, our current activities include a rural community assessment project, a CEU workshop focused on the concerns of social workers that are in rural areas, and tracking the infrastructure bill.
If you'd like to join the task force please email kjones.naswnv@socialworkers.org Also, please consider taking a lead in chairing the task force as a social worker living or working in rural or frontier Nevada!
The Racial Equity Committee:
The Racial Equity Committee of the Nevada NASW Board under the leadership of Cyndi Carpluck, has been very busy over the past months working on several initiatives.
First and foremost, our primary activity was to revise and update the Diversity/Affirmation Action Plan. These revisions include ways in which Nevada NASW will actively fulfill one of our major tenets within our Mission Statement, which is to advance the cause of diversity within Nevada.
Our updated and revised Diversity/Affirmation Action Plan was presented to the full board and approved for implementation with the goal of updating this plan again in 2024.
One aspect of the Diversity/Affirmation Action Plan involves the expansion of member recruitment efforts. A sub-committee of the Racial Equity Task Force, consisting of members, Sandra Abdullah, Mavis Major, and Amanda Simons, has begun the recruitment efforts by reaching out to the social work departments at both The University of Nevada Reno and Las Vegas, to leverage existing relationships in an effort to gain access to the social work student body with the goal of providing workshops training and information about the benefits of joining NASW.
As a result of this effort, Sandra Abdullah was given an opportunity to serve as a Field Education liaison for Nevada NASW for a UNLV social work student! This was an exciting development. Sandra has been busy developing a macro field experience for this new student, who will be joining NASW as a student intern in the coming weeks.