Community Resource Exchange Network

The goals of CREN are 1) to generate and share information for public dissemination, 2) to improve access to social work knowledge to maintain competence in practice and, 3) to translate field experiences into bodies of knowledge.

CREN will consist of three opportunities:

1.    Educational opportunities through brown bag seminars, summits, and dialogues.

2.    Dissemination of evidence based research and practice through an enhanced web page.

3.    Piloting of a community-learning laboratory through a student-led forum on practice and research.

 

Dialogue on Father's Role in Child Maltreatment

On Friday, December 12th 2008 The School of Social Work's Center for Social Work Practice and Policy Research hosted a dialogue at Greater Grace Temple in Detroit.  The aim of the dialogues is to create an opportunity to bridge the gap between social work practice and research. The topic of this first dialogue was entitled, “The Role of Fathers in Child Maltreatment.” Social work practitioners who work in this area and researchers who study fathers and child maltreatment participated in the event.  The attendees included practitioners  from Black Family Development Inc., the City of Detroit Health Department, Matrix Human Services, Wayne County Head Start, The Guidance Center, Children's Hospital of Detroit,  Merrill Palmer Skillman Institute, Spectrum Human Services, the Michigan Department of Human Services, and Don Bosco Hall. Also in attendance were Wayne State University faculty and staff from the School of Social Work, the College of Education and the Department of Psychology.   

The  event began with panel  presentations  by Dr. Shawna Lee of Wayne State University’s School of Social Work, Mr. Roy Wilds from Don Bosco Hall, Dr. Shirley Thomas of Wayne State University’s School of Social Work, Benjamin Hoskins of Spectrum Human Services and Dr. Doug Barnett of Wayne State University’s Department of Psychology.  The presentations were followed by small group break-out discussions where practitioners and researchers were given time to dialogue regarding the most meaningful and “eye-opening” components of the presentations and how might the information learned influence their current practice or research.  The dialogue produced many interesting comments and ideas.  Most notable was the finding that fathers want to be involved in the treatment process, as well as information suggesting that fathers are sometimes over-looked by practitioners.  The break out groups also provided an opportunity for the participants to engage in discussion about questions they have for research and/or practice, what inconsistencies exist between research and practice, and how social work can address these inconsistencies.  Dialogues also included discourse regarding practitioners and researchers experiences in working with fathers who maltreat, successful strategies to engage fathers in the lives of their children, evidence-based programs that intervene in child maltreatment perpetrated by fathers, and strategies that may assist in bridging the gap between research and practice.

On this page you will find the presentations given at this dialogue.  Information that resulted from this dialogue will be used to further discussion via the blog, small work groups and research collaborations.  This is the first of many dialogues the Center for Social Work Practice and Policy Research hopes to host in fulfilling its mission of information exchange and knowledge dissemination.