The Social Work Podcast

My downstairs neighbor recently invited me out for a walk to a coffee shop and, since I hadn’t left the house for most of the day, I was excited to go. We started talking about her job and all the craziness that comes with it. She works with girls that are about to age out of the foster care system and each case has a string of heartbreaks and frustrations that comes along with it. In each wild situation she described though, she knew she was helping those girls. She was doing work that mattered and that made all of it worth it.

Helping people is what social workers have dedicated their lives to, but in order for those professionals to provide the highest quality care, they need someone helping them as well. Dr. Jonathan Singer, Ph. D., LCSW, has stepped into the world of podcasting to help the helpers via The Social Work Podcast.

The Social Work Podcast is an irregularly scheduled podcast series that is mostly interview-based, although occasionally there are episodes with just me talking. The point is to bring information to social workers and other mental health professionals that they can use to provide better service to their clients.”

From the practical to the conceptual, Jonathan covers any topic that will help these professionals serve even more effectively. Born out of years of work as a social work professor, the show began when Jonathan realized that his students would lose access to the knowledge they needed as soon as they left the classroom.

I saw that there was a need for social work students to have access to accurate and useful information about how to practice better. And some of the information they were getting access to in their programs, but they weren’t going to have access to after they graduated. They were going to sell their books back or they were going to return the rentals…

So Jonathan started recording his lectures and posting them to a website for his students, past and present, could access them. Then he discovered podcasts, and decided to convert the audio files over and create The Social Work Podcast. Shocked by the number of visits his site started to get (he attributes the thousands of unique visitors to the gap in social work resources), Jonathan moved to hosting guests on the show to cover a wider range of topics.

I love learning from my guests. They’re so smart and they have such good information. At a practical level I get to use the insight that I gained from them when I teach.

Jonathan is excited to keep growing his show and seeing more and more professionals gain access to the information they need to serve those around them. He plans to continue to tell the stories of those in the social work world for the good of those coming in and those already working there.

So, if you’re a social work student, worker, or just curious about how to best serve people who may need help, The Social Work Podcast is for you.

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