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Policy in Action: Personal

Policy often has a personal effect. You may have encountered policies that have empowered you, or you may have encountered policies that have made you feel powerless. The client populations that you will work with are no different. Policymaking involves social workers acting to identify, formulate, legitimize, implement, and evaluate social policies.

Discussion 1 (A), you identify one policy that has affected you, a family member, a colleague, a friend, or a client. How did the policy empower you or a family member, colleague, friend, or client? How has it made you or another person feel powerless? How does this policy affect social work practice?

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• Identify one policy that has affected you, a family member(s), colleagues, or a client (e.g., Medicaid, Section 504 of the Rehabilitation Act of 1973, etc.).
• Describe how the policy empowered you, your family member(s), or your client to take action.
• Or describe how you understood the policy to be deliberately intended to create a specific result.
• Explain how your understanding of this connection between the policy and its result relates to social work practice.

• Explain how the intent of the policy that your colleague described might be better understood.

• Discussion 1(B)Policy in Action: Community

  As a social worker engaged in policymaking, you will be asked to identify and define community problems. You will also see policy in action—or policy inaction—in your community. That is, you will encounter policies that meet or do not meet expectations. Did a local community service lose its funding? What happened to those who used it—but also, why did it lose its funding? For this Discussion, you identify a situation where policy implementation failed to meet a community need, either in a daily capacity or in a time of crisis.

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  To prepare: Identify a situation where policy implementation failed to meet a community need, either in a daily capacity or in a time of crisis.
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  • Summarize the policy implementation situation you have chosen to examine. (Provide references to news stories describing the situation, if applicable.)
  • Describe your expectations for how an existing policy should have addressed the situation.
  • Explain how existing policies and politics actually functioned or did not function to address the situation.
  • Explain how your colleague’s difference between policy expectation and outcome could have been more rational.