Paid Social Work Internships Part 1 Payment 4 Placements – Matt Dargay, MSW & Arie Davey, LLMSW

Doin’ The Work: Frontline Stories of Social Change

Episode 61
Guests: Matt Dargay, MSW & Arie Davey, LLMSW
Host: Shimon Cohen, LCSW

www.dointhework.com
Listen/Subscribe on: Apple Podcasts, Google Podcasts, Stitcher, Spotify
Follow on Twitter & Instagram, Like on Facebook
Join the mailing list
Support the podcast
Download transcript

If you love what we discuss on the podcast, then you will love our courses! We focus on frameworks, knowledge, and skills to engage in anti-racist, anti-oppressive, justice-based liberatory practice. CEs are available. Check out https://dointhework.com/courses/ to learn more and register. We hope you will join us!

Are you a fully-licensed clinician interested in private practice? Alma and Headway make it super easy! I’ve been using them to manage my private practice. Both handle insurance credentialing and provide you with an electronic health record. If you are interested in learning more, use my referral links for each and they will contact you.
Alma
Headway

Thank you to this episode’s sponsor! The University of Houston has a phenomenal social work program that offers face-to-face master's and doctorate degrees, as well as an online and hybrid MSW. They offer one of the country’s only Political Social Work programs and an Abolitionist Focused Learning Opportunity. Located in the heart of Houston, the program is guided by their bold vision to achieve social, racial, economic, and political justice, local to global. In the classroom and through research, they are committed to challenging systems and reimagining ways to achieve justice and liberation. Go to http://www.uh.edu/socialwork to learn more.

In this episode, I talk with Matt Dargay and Arie Davey, the co-founders of the group Payment 4 Placements, which advocates for social work students to have paid internships. This episode is Part 1 of a two-part series on social work students organizing for paid internships. They started this group as MSW students at the University of Michigan, and there are now chapters across the U.S. We talk about the overall issue of social work students not only being required to complete free internships to graduate, but also having to pay for the internship credits. We discuss the inequities of this unpaid internship system in terms of who gets to be a social worker, the debt of social work students, and how the national accrediting organization, the Council on Social Work Education, released a report stating that the cost of a social work degree is much higher for Black social work students. Arie and Matt present numerous ways to fund paid internships and talk about the organizing they’ve done at the University of Michigan and at the state level. They helped pass legislation to fund students interning as mental health counselors in schools across the state of Michigan, including funds for student interns in related disciplines, such as mental health counseling and psychology. They share their experiences organizing with the graduate union at the University of Michigan and offer additional strategies for social work students and others who want to address this critical issue. We have to challenge the mentality of “that’s just the way it is” and use our social work skills to organize for change. I hope this conversation inspires you to action.

Link to Part 2: Paid Social Work Internships Part 2 FED UP – Beth Wagner, Claire Mancuso, Natalia Norzagaray & Parham Daghighi

Instagram paymentforplacementsumich
Twitter @P4PUofM
Facebook Payment for Placements at the University of Michigan
Email [e-mail] [e-mail]

Music credit:
"District Four" Kevin MacLeod (incompetech.com)
Licensed under Creative Commons: By Attribution 4.0 License
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/