Benchmark - Advocating for Clients Essay

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Grand Canyon University *

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636

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Arts Humanities

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Apr 3, 2024

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docx

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1 Benchmark - Advocating for Clients Essay Gabrielle Saldana College of Humanities and Social Sciences, Grand Canyon University SWK-636 Dr. Lindsey Marek November 29, 2023

2 Benchmark - Advocating for Clients Essay After speaking with my field instructor, I realized that our agency is limited in the ways we can advocate for our clients through policies. Being that we offer court mandated programs, we must run our policies through the department of social services, probation department, and the court system to ensure that they align with what these agencies require. For example, our clients must complete either 12 or 26 weeks of Anger Management and according to the department of social services and probation department, they are only allowed to miss 2 classes before they are placed on hold. If they miss another class, they are dropped from the program and must re-enroll, starting over from the beginning. This is not a policy we can change because we are not the ones who determine the requirements. Our role is to provide the services and the social services who refer our clients are the ones who create the policies that we must follow. Where advocating does come into the picture, however, is our agency being able to advocate for a client to continue with their services after being placed on hold. Once they miss two classes, the client is placed on hold, and we must have a meeting with the client, our program director, and their county social worker. At this meeting, our agency can advocate for the client and ask the county to resume their services without making them re-enroll and start over. Often, the county grants the client permission to continue their classes and they can resume the following week. For policies to change, our agency would have to meet with the department of social services and the probation department to discuss the policies that are not effective and ways we would like to implement new policies. My field instructor has noticed and shared with me that our agency does not change the polices because the current policies seem to be effective. What we have noticed, is that our

3 Benchmark - Advocating for Clients Essay clients are struggling with maintaining employment while also having to come to their class and many attend multiple classes a week. Since our agency’s latest class is from 5-7pm, most of our clients must adjust their schedule to meet their court mandated programs and have to take a cut to their hours. This has been a limitation to the services we provide because clients are unable to either make their class, or they aren’t making enough to show the courts that they can have their children back in their custody. For policy to be effective, “ social workers must understand how policies are implemented to create actual results and must be able to identify bottlenecks in the path from policy to tangible change” (Tulane University School of Social Work, 2021, p.1 ). If I were to create a new policy for my agency, it would be that anyone who is unable to attend groups during normal business hours would be given the option to attend a group online via Zoom from 7-9pm. I would suggest that our agency allow that group facilitator the opportunity to facilitate the group from their home to ensure they are not alone in the office at 9pm. By offering another class later in the evening and online, it allows for more clients to finish their program while relieving the stress of finding childcare, adjusting schedule changes, and finding transportation to and from the agency. As social workers evaluate policies, “it is important that the social worker identify whether the phenomenon he or she is considering has been formally recognized as a problem or unmet need by the organization, as this recognition impacts how the social worker will need to begin his or her efforts” (Poulin et al., 2018, p.231). It is a well-known problem at our agency that our clients need access to later classes and online classes, but we are struggling to find group facilitators to match this need. We do often have interns looking to be placed with our agency

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