Students progressing through the Brown School’s social work curriculum are weaving together the newest research findings with practitioners and clients on the ground to shape the most promising strategies for real-world issues.
Their work reflects the melding of the School’s new process model for evidence-based practice (EBP) with the School’s emphasis on service learning — hands-on, practical experiences where students can make a difference today while mastering skills for the future.
Although EBP has been a hallmark of a Brown School social work education for some time, the traditional focus has been a specific practice or set of practices. The School is returning to the original idea that EBP is really a process that one follows to make critical decisions about a treatment, an organizational change, or a social policy.
The new model centers on a five-step process best summarized by the mnemonic “FLAIR”:
- Formulate the question
- Locate the best available evidence
- Assess the quality of the evidence
- Integrate the evidence with judgment; impacted person(s); and social context, such as laws, policies, and culture
- Review process
Through coursework and field experiences, MSW students will apply this model to address a number of social work practice and policy challenges.
Service learning is a pedagogical approach that is coming of age and is appropriate for teaching EBP. “It embraces the idea that students can learn to be effective agents within democracy by working in communities on real-world issues,” explains Assistant Professor Amanda Moore McBride, director of the University’s Richard A. Gephardt Institute for Public Service, where she promotes service learning across the campus. She is also research director at Brown’s Center for Social Development, where she studies its effectiveness.
In this class, which McBride teaches, student teams work with community organizations on practice-related questions or issues. Teams puts the EBP model to work and walks the organization through the FLAIR process, identifying the stakeholders involved in the issue to be addressed, assessing the community and the issue, researching evidence-based practices or strategies employed elsewhere to deal with the same or similar issues, exploring the feasibility or applicability of these practices with stakeholders, and recommending strategies for addressing the issue.
One student team worked with the St. Louis Community Financial Access Pilot (CFAP), a collaborative of bankers, social service providers, and others working as part of a U.S. Treasury Department effort to reach out to the unbanked.
Research shows that nationally some 22 million people are unbanked or underbanked; that is, they obtain financial products from alternative financial services like money-order providers and check-cashing outlets rather than banks — at significant additional cost. One of the awful ironies of the unbanked, according to MSW student Joe Jovanovich, is “the poor end up spending far more on basic financial interactions than those who have means.”
The local CFAP group, however wanted local data about the unbanked in St. Louis, according to Cassandra Kaufman, a CFAP member and a director in the United Way’s Community Investment Division.
The students set about to gather that local data in 2009. They surveyed a small sample of unbanked persons, interviewing clients at free tax preparation sites. More importantly, they meticulously mapped every bank, credit union, and alternative services provider. Using Google maps, GIS tools, and literally driving the streets of North and South St. Louis, they made a startling discovery.
“One of the most significant findings was the disparity, geographically, in where financial institutions have physical bricks-and-mortar locations,” Kaufman said. Zip Code 63107 in North St. Louis, predominantly African-American, has one bank for every 8,000 residents; Zip Code 63118 in South St. Louis, largely white, has one bank for every 4,500, almost twice as many per capita.
After exhaustive investigations, the team ultimately recommended that CFAP adopt a California model known as Bank On, but, MSW student Alexis Santi observes, “it needs to be adapted to the St. Louis region. You can’t tell someone to take two or three buses to get to a bank downtown.” To reach the unbanked in North St. Louis, banks will have to develop a physical presence there.
Student researchers also found that trust was an issue. So CFAP, using that information, brought financial institutions and community organizations together to design a town hall meeting model where potential banking customers can ask questions, learn about financial services and, if they choose, open accounts. In the same meetings, they can register to attend financial education seminars.
For the students, putting the EBP model to work, tying all the research, all the theory, all the ground-level data together was, in Santi’s words, “a powerful experience.” For CFAP, too, the project was invaluable. “They were able to do some on-the-ground research that this collaboration lacked the resources and manpower to do,” Kaufman says.
Read the full story and hear more from our students in the next issue of Social Impact, our annual magazine.
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Written by Betsy Rogers