Social work students’ art makes statement

PRESQUE ISLE – When a group of master’s students wanted to express the problems they face while practicing social work in northern Maine, they used art to do it.

Graduate students in the Master of Social Work program, offered in Aroostook County by the University of New England, recently created life-size body outlines as part of their class, Creative Arts in Social Work Practice.

Students said Saturday that they used the art project to make a statement about what social workers do and the issues they face, such as limited funding and resources.

“This was a project to do something in the community to make a difference and make people more aware of some of the things we face as social workers,” Allison Reed said Saturday.

She and Katie O’Connell are two of the 15 students participating in the six-week class taught in Presque Isle. UNE rents office and classroom space from the University of Maine at Presque Isle to run the program in northern Maine.

Reed and O’Connell explained that some think of social workers as the people who come to take away children. They said the class wanted to help change that perception and, at the same time, advocate for their profession and their clients. The project, they said, was a way to get their voices heard.

“This was an advocacy project to demonstrate how they [students] feel about funding cuts,” Judy Boudman, MSW program instructor, said Sunday. “They were trying to show how this is undervalued, underappreciated, low-paying work, but necessary.”

Boudman said the choice of an art mural was a smart way for students to show how they feel.

“Images speak louder than words sometimes. That was the point of this,” Boudman said. “You can be out protesting, but there’s something about an image that really captures someone’s attention.”

Some of the problems displayed in the murals include increasing caseloads, lack of funding in the mental health community, the elimination of some programs, and limited resources in rural Maine. Issues also include dealing with government-proposed budget cuts and the human misery and social problems that accompany such cuts.

O’Connell explained that students voted to do the “gigantic art mural” project as a way to point out the injustices in the professional field and to serve as a source of empowerment. The class also wrote a statement to accompany the project, which states that social workers “need to unite, advocate and join together for social reform and institutional changes.”

“There needs to be a healthy balance of helping ourselves so we can help other people,” O’Connell said.