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A new practicum at the Brown School offers students interested in management the opportunity to immerse themselves in hands-on work with the CEOs of leading non-profits in the St. Louis area. The CEO Fellowship program is pairing seven students with top executives in six agencies for a two-semester, side-by-side paid learning experience in key roles that contribute to the agencies’ needs.

One semester into the initiative, the fellowships are getting rave reviews from students and their executive partners.

“It’s been absolutely amazing,” said Kelsey Knoploh, MSW ’22, who is working at St. Louis Arc, a non-profit that provides services to adults with intellectual and developmental disabilities. “I’ve had wonderful mentors in the organization who made sure I took on assignments that challenged me and developed the skills I was looking for.” Those challenges include developing materials for strategic planning, a survey for parents and participants, assessment tools and a plan for race equity, using social media.

“It’s been a great opportunity for us and for her,” said Mark A. Keeley, MSW ’89, who is president and CEO of St. Louis Arc, which has hosted Brown School practicums before. “This is a much-elevated practicum from those for students whose studies are more service-related. Kelsey has been entrusted with tasks not usually assigned in a practicum, like strategic planning. She has contributed a lot to our weekly management discussions, taking an active role and very helpful in taking the burden off others. She also provides fresh eyes from outside the organization, and that’s been very helpful.”

The fellowships were developed by Barbara Levin, teaching professor in the Office of Field Education; and Barry Rosenberg, professor of practice, for students in the Social Impact Leadership concentration on the Leadership & Management track. “We really wanted students to have a high-level, intensely focused practicum experience, assigned to management tasks that normally students might not have access to,” Levin said. She and Rosenberg explained their idea to CEOs in the St. Louis area with whom they had worked on other practicums, gauged interest, and got feedback.

Participating CEOs presented their agencies in a panel for interested students. Students applied to their top three choices and the CEOs did the same, resulting in win-win matching fellowships. Students make a two-semester commitment to the agencies, which fund the fellowships. The fellowship choices are made in the spring of the students’ first year.

“The students develop a relationship with a CEO, learning what the job is, how a CEO manages a large, complex organization,” Levin said. “We’re very grateful to the CEOs; they’re among the busiest people around. They get a great, high-level motivated student to work in their agency.”

Grace Jalboot, MSW ’22, is one of two fellows who are working at PreventEd, a non-profit that works to reduce or prevent harms of alcohol and other drug use through education, early intervention and advocacy in the St. Louis area. She is working with Executive Director Nichole Dawsey on strategy, management and program delivery. Her projects have included facilitating a listening session with employees to get a sense of employee engagement, strategic planning, and helping departments write racial equity statements. In the future, she’ll try to strengthen PreventEd’s relationships with other nonprofits.

Jalboot majored in sociology as an undergraduate at WashU and came to the Brown School with the thought of working with children and families. “I realized I didn’t want as much direct practice,” she said, adding that the fellowship was an opportunity to maintain her interest in children while building her management skills. “This is an awesome way to support organizations that are already doing great work,” she said. “I’m getting to see the impact, taking what we learned in the classroom and putting theory into practice. Already I feel ingrained in the organization; I feel appreciated and it’s been great. Everyone there is still learning, no matter how long they’ve been there. It was really refreshing.”

Dawsey said continuing education for staff has been a longstanding principle of PreventEd. “The way we’re set up, we value learning and growth and coaching, it’s one of the things that we pride ourselves on,” she said.

Her experience so far with the fellows has been “awesome,” she said. “This has been big for us. They came on at a time when there’s a tremendous amount of change happening – COVID, racial equity, and our strategic plan, which is expiring at the end of the year. Grace has been instrumental in getting our next strategic plan underway. What I appreciate most is getting a fresh perspective, a breath of fresh air from the students. When they suggest something, they then follow through with suggestions on how to do it, and sometimes do it themselves.” “I can’t speak highly enough of the program. I feel sometimes like I’ve won the lottery.”

Other agencies and their CEOs who are hosting fellows are: Behavioral Health Response, Pat Coleman; Care and Counseling, Laurie Phillips; Family Forward, Karen Nolte; and Wyman Center, Claire Wyneken.

Although Open Classroom, the Brown School’s innovative digital forum for learning, was born of a pandemic, its success appears to ensure that it will continue to exist well after the crisis that spawned it. The program has featured dozens of presentations by faculty and community leaders on current topics in social work and public health and has been attended by thousands of participants from around the U.S. and the world.

“Open Classroom is fulfilling a need I don’t think anyone anticipated,” said Janet Gillow, the Brown School’s director of Professional Development, who oversees the free, lunch-hour Zoom events that are recorded and available on the school’s YouTube channel. “We’ve found a tremendous appetite for learning events that don’t require driving to campus and parking in the garage in the middle of the day. It’s also an open portal that could connect us with prospective students, colleagues at peer institutions, and others all over the world.”

The initiative began early in the pandemic after the office of Dean Mary McKay got requests from community organizations the school had partnered with. The organizations had to send clients home during the initial lockdown but wanted to make good use of their staff’s time. McKay and Gillow developed a series of 10 webinars, and asked for faculty volunteers to lead them.

The program’s first offering on March 30, 2020, was about the pandemic’s impact on older people and was led by Nancy Morrow-Howell, the Betty Bofinger Brown Distinguished Professor of Social Policy. The reception for the inaugural session of the fledgling program was an eye-opener: 170 people attended live and the recording was viewed more than 1,200 times. Another, about the disparate impact of COVID-19 on people of color, was attended by more than 300 and has been viewed on YouTube over 2,000 times.

“Everyone on our faculty stepped up so beautifully,” said McKay, the Neidorff Family and Centene Corporation Dean of the Brown School. “Although the pandemic prevented us from hosting large gatherings in Hillman Hall, Open Classroom has enabled us to offer our local community and communities around the world our expertise and that of other leaders to build understanding and promote evidence-based change, which is the essence of the Brown School’s mission.” She noted that Brown students were engaged to find other providers of free training and created a library of resources.

Open Classroom has offered more than 140 programs and attracted 40,000 viewers from all 50 states and 12 foreign countries, Gillow said. Faculty, professional development instructors and alumni have been among the leaders of the lectures and panels, which have included a mix of scholarly experts, community practitioners, and other community voices. Initial topics were related to COVID-19 but went on to include presentation/discussions on varied subjects, including:

Cynthia Williams, assistant dean for community partnerships, helped develop Open Classroom and has served as the moderator for many of the sessions, including several that dealt with COVID-19 and race. “Our COVID & Race series has been among our most-viewed programs,” she said, and included local experts such as Dr. Alex Garza, who led the St. Louis Metropolitan Pandemic Task Force; Angela Fleming Brown, CEO of the St. Louis Regional Health Commission; and faculty such as Sean Joe, the Benjamin E. Youngdahl Professor of Social Development.

“It has been a real pleasure for me,” Williams said. “Those voices helped to give clarity around the science and practice put in place during COVID to keep the community safe and informed in real-time.” She said the virtual classes were as or more impactful than in-person events might have been. “The big difference was the audience could be expanded, easily accessible, and helped us ensure we could get voices of leaders who didn’t have to worry about traveling, parking, and fitting [it] into their packed schedules.”

Williams is particularly proud of the Black History Month classes in 2021 that featured weekly panels and drew large audiences.

As a moderator, Williams said the virtual sessions make it easier to synthesize audience questions. “We get to the facts faster, and get the most out of an hour,” she said. “It makes things much more efficient.”

The efficiency and convenience were appreciated by the audience as well.

“I thought it was a wonderful idea,” said Peggy Keilholz, MSW ’84, a retired social worker who found out about Open Classroom through mailings from the Brown School and so far has attended 28 classes. “I was attending so many I bought notebooks. I had notes flying everywhere. And it had the right price tag: Free.”

She particularly liked the classes that featured public health experts like Timothy McBride, Bernard Becker Professor at the Brown School. “It was information that was extremely useful, and not available in the media,” she said. Most impactful for her was Joe’s reflection that “race” and “racial” were often artificial constructs. “There is only one human race,” she said. “I’ve used that over and over again.”

Perhaps the largest audience for an Open Classroom event was one in which Mark Rank, the Herbert S. Hadley Professor of Social Welfare, launched his new book, “Poorly Understood: What America Gets Wrong About Poverty.” More than 1,000 people signed up and 500 hundred attended, with many more watching the recorded event later – numbers that Rank said were far more than those he typically receives at in-person book events. “It was a great turnout,” said Rank, who talked for 30 minutes about the book and then opened it up for questions and discussion.

“It was different because when you do stuff in front of people, you get a sense of the crowd and make a connection,” he said. “The great advantage of Open Classroom is I can do it from my office and people from all over can attend. I’d compare it with my virtual teaching. The advantage is I can see everybody and their name, and the discussion tends to be better.”

“I don’t think virtual events will replace in-person learning, but will be another important tool for us to use in the future.”

The disparity of location of the participants can make for some unscripted moments. Rank said he participated in one Open Classroom event with Brown alumnus Stephanie Krauss, who had written a new book and was participating from her hotel room in Florida. Halfway through, the audience could hear a frantic knocking on her door, telling her there was a fire in the building and she had to evacuate (she did), leaving Rank to finish the hour. “I had to wing it,” he said. “It was crazy.”

Carol Klukaczewski, who lives in Wisconsin, heard about Open Classroom from her daughter, Grace Newton, MSW ’21, who recommended an April 2020 class led by Melissa Johnson-Reid, Ralph and Muriel Pumphrey Professor of Social Work Research, on protecting children during COVID-19. “The information was very current and relevant because COVID was just expanding and people were concerned about kids,” said Klukaczewski, a retired social worker who has attended more than 20 classes.

“Besides providing a window into the world of what my daughter was experiencing (Newton is now a social worker in Madison, WI), the sessions have kept me abreast of cutting-edge research, programs, and strategies that deal with health, poverty, diversity and equity, child welfare and more. Through these extremely accessible programs, I have become even more aware of the need to continue to be active as a citizen. They are a great reminder that we all have a role to play in making this a better society.”

Gillow said Open Classroom has opened previously unimagined doors for the school. “We’re been able to do things we’ve never dreamed of before,” she said. “It’s been a surprise and an adventure. It felt meaningful to do something people found value in, especially when so many people were feeling so much pain.”

An innovative program to support Brown School students who are interested in completing part of their practicums in Indian Country has received additional funding of nearly $1 million for an additional four years to build capacity for integrated and trauma-informed behavioral health care. The program, Social Workers Advancing through Grounded Education (SAGE), is led by the Kathryn M. Buder Center for American Indian Studies at the Brown School.

“The SAGE program is open to any Brown School student who wants to practice in Native communities,” said Kellie Thompson, director of the Buder Center. “The program creates opportunities and reduces student financial burden so students can train to be culturally respectful social workers in Indian Country.”

The SAGE program has funded 69 Brown School social work students since it began in 2014 and was expanded in 2018 to include students in the public health program. The most recent funding by the U.S. Health Resource and Services Administration will support training social work students, including courses and practica in Indian Country. The Buder Center has developed strong relationships nationally with American Indian & Alaska Native organizations, tribes and communities, including important alumni connections. SAGE practicum sites will be organizations serving Native communities and support Native well-being through integrated care, trauma-informed care and behavioral healthcare.

The SAGE program will continue to include training stipends through the Center for Innovation in Child Maltreatment Policy Research and Training, led by Melissa Jonson-Reid, the Ralph and Muriel Pumphrey Professor of Social Work Research at the Brown School.

“It has been an honor to be able to partner with the Buder Center in the SAGE project and watch it grow over the past several years as it builds capacity to serve indigenous peoples across the country in areas of behavioral health, family violence prevention and trauma intervention,” said Jonson-Reid.

“This new opportunity greatly expands the number of students to be served each year as well as provides ongoing infrastructure for collaboration such as the CICM’s support of specific training components. Additionally, it provides matching funding to further expand the program.”

SAGE complements the Buder Center’s central mission, to support the Buder Foundation Scholarship program and to prepare Buder Scholars to be leaders in the field of social work. In 1990, Kathryn M. Buder worked with Native leaders around the country to determine what a center could look like with the aim to prepare students as future social workers who go back to their communities to serve as leaders. Thompson shared there have been 222 Buder scholars since 1990.

“The support the Buder Center receives from the Foundation creates opportunities for Native students and makes everything else we do possible,” Thompson said.

“Students come to the Brown School because of the Center, the American Indian/Alaska Native concentration, and other opportunities like SAGE.”

Thompson said the COVID-19 pandemic required suspending some of the SAGE practicums, while others started virtually. “The Center has tried to create as many opportunities as we can without overwhelming the virtual space we all live in,” Thompson said. The American Indian Student Association hosted virtual talking circles, and the Center adapted in various ways as well, including watching films, delivering and mailing groceries and care packages, and hosting its annual Pow Wow virtually on March 27-28. The Pow Wow reached over 13,000 with its program of music, drums and dancing. “I believe our Native community felt the Pow Wow provided needed connections during a very difficult, isolating year,” she said.

The Center also created the Digital Indigenous Storytelling Project, which shared Indigenous people’s stories who are from the state of Missouri. “Sharing these stories was a way to feel connected to each other,” Thompson said. “Our oral tradition is so important. We are going to continue adding interviews and document the stories of Native people in Missouri to save and share.”

Recently, the Center recently welcomed a new Assistant Director, Veronica Bruesch (Wichita/Ponca), to replace Wynette Whitegoat (Diné), who is pursuing a doctoral degree. Bruesch, MSW ’16 is a Buder Scholar alumna who concentrated in American Indian/Alaska Native populations while at the Brown School. A graduate of Haskell Indian Nations University, she has dedicated her time since graduating from the Brown School to serving Native children and families.

“We are excited to have Veronica back at the Center as part of the team,” Thompson said. “And we are happy to welcome Wynette

Matthew Kreuter, the Kahn Family Professor of Public Health at the Brown School at Washington University in St. Louis, has received a one-year $1.4 million grant from National Institutes of Health’s Community Engagement Alliance (CEAL) Against COVID-19 Disparities. Funding was supported by the American Rescue Plan.

The grant, which will help to increase COVID-19 vaccinations among Black residents in St. Louis City and County, has a number of partners, including the St. Louis City Department of Health, St. Louis County Department of Health, St. Louis COVID-19 Regional Response Team, United Way, Home State Health/Centene, 211, and Washington University’s Brown School, School of Medicine and Sam Fox School of Design & Visual Arts.

“COVID-19 has impacted the Black community in St. Louis unequally in nearly all ways — sickness, death and financial strain,” Kreuter said. “We must do everything possible to avoid the same gaps when it comes to the protection of vaccinations. Every organization in St. Louis can contribute in some way.”

The grant has four aims:

Kreuter and several of the same partners were also awarded a one-year $500,000 grant from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as part of the university’s Prevention Research Center.matt

The second grant has three aims:

Whether to return children to in-person classes during the COVID-19 pandemic has been a tough decision for many parents, but it’s been an especially difficult one for families whose children have special needs. Researchers at the Brown School Evaluation Center recently completed listening sessions with families and staff in the St. Louis Special School District to better understand the barriers to COVID testing. They came away with findings that inform what parents and staff are looking for in information and communication that can encourage testing as a way to reopen schools.​

“Our discussions with parents and staff gave us rich insight into the special challenges faced by families and schools alike,” said Nancy Mueller, director of the Evaluation Center. “The information we received is helping to guide our testing and communications protocols as our team conducts testing in the schools.”​

The 31 listening sessions were conducted last fall with 24 family members and 57 school staff as part of a larger study led by the Washington University School of Medicine in a partnership with the district, which serves students with special needs, including intellectual and developmental disabilities. The research is funded by a two-year, $5 million grant from the National Institutes of Health to the School of Medicine, which is offering weekly saliva-based COVID-19 tests to students, teachers and staff in the district’s six schools.​

Staff and parents shared similar benefits and similar concerns about returning to school in person. Many recognized the benefits of in-person learning, such as increased access to educational opportunities, care and therapies, as well as the enhanced social and emotional benefits of in-person class. Some, however, were still anxious, citing the challenges in implementing social hygiene and preventive measures at school, as well as the risk for more severe complications for students with special needs, were they to contract the virus.​

Families said the saliva-based testing helped keep schools safe and increased their comfort level for returning children to school. Many parents applauded the saliva tests, which were easier for many special-needs students than nasal swabs.​

“I just think having this option in any way, shape or form is fantastic,” one parent said. “And it completely increases my comfort level of sending my son to school in person.”​

Staff and parents alike voiced the need for frequent and consistent communication about evolving district policies and procedures, such as quarantine and contact tracing. “Providing information and providing it consistently to all students and parents is really essential right now,” one participant said. Trusted sources of information about district policies included school nurses, teachers, case managers and principals; for information about COVID, participants said they looked to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, primary care physicians and health professionals, and the Washington University research team.​/

Feedback from the listening sessions was used by research team members from the Health Communication Research Laboratory at the Brown School, who have crafted messages about testing that are now being delivered to parents, caregivers and school staff.​

Findings from the Evaluation Center’s listening sessions were compiled in a brief that has been shared with the district.​

A new center directed by the Brown School’s Kim Thuy Seelinger is addressing human rights issues with a focus on gender- and migration-related issues locally and across the globe. The Center for Human Rights, Gender and Migration, based at Washington University in St. Louis’ Institute for Public Health, was established in 2020.

“The aim of the Center is to promote evidence-based solutions for challenges arising in the intersection of human rights violations, gender, and migration,” said Seelinger, research associate professor at the Brown School. “These are complex issues on their own – so when they overlap, problem-solving requires creative and transdisciplinary thinking. We’re interested in applied research – we draw on diverse methods and areas of expertise from across campus to address knowledge gaps. Then we work with policymakers and practitioners to devise and implement solutions.” Seelinger understands a thing or two about harnessing multiple disciplines – she is a social science researcher and lawyer, with faculty appointments both at the Brown School and the School of Law. She came to Washington University in late 2019 from the University of California, Berkeley, to start the Center with the support of her longtime colleague, Julia Uyttewaal. Uyttewaal serves as the Center’s manager.

Only a year old, the Center has become a powerful draw for students at the Brown School and across the university. Lacy Broemel, MSW ’21, serves as co-chair of the Center’s Student Advisory Council, a diverse group whose academic expertise includes social work, public health, law and English literature. “I’ve really enjoyed connecting with students from other programs to share research opportunities,” she said. She came to the Brown School to pursue her interest in refugee and immigration issues and the Center has well placed her to do that. “It’s been great to stay so connected to the field,” said Broemel.

One current project in that field, for which the Center recently received a $597,000 award from the U.S. State Department, addresses sexual and gender-based violence (SGBV) among refugees and migrants in Mexico, Greece and Kenya. The project has immediacy, as the Biden administration revisits immigration policy and more than 500,000 more migrants and refugees journey north from Central America through Mexico each year. The work is needed more than ever due to the heightened refugee crisis in Mexico, Uyttewaal said. “Asylum seekers have been stuck in informal settlements in Mexico in incredibly unsafe conditions for several years. Some tried to cross the border when Biden became president, but they were sent back to these dangerous areas to wait longer.”

Many of these migrants are vulnerable to sexual abuse and exploitation. Seelinger has spent years studying the barriers that survivors face in revealing experiences of SGBV suffered during armed conflict and forced displacement.

“It’s something I saw from my lawyer days, representing immigrants who had experienced sexual violence. Disclosure is the gateway to access support and protection,” Seelinger said. “This is particularly critical for refugees– they have often suffered terrible things at home or on the road. With this new funding, we can build on our recent research in Mexico and Central America to better understand and address disclosure barriers in other contexts, as well. Disclosure is important, but it has to be approached ethically, safely.”

Based on the initial research in Mexico and Guatemala, the Center partnered with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees and local organizations in Mexico to develop a practical toolkit to improve the way service providers understand and approach refugees’ disclosure of SGBV. Seelinger and Uyttewaal have spent the past two years developing the toolkit in workshops with service providers working with refugees there.

The current project will evaluate how that tool is working in Mexico and extend research to Greece and Kenya. The ultimate aim is to develop an adaptable toolkit for practitioners working in diverse humanitarian crises around the world. The UNHCR will disseminate the final tools and research as part of its global guidance related to SGBV.

Other Center projects led by Seelinger include:

The coronavirus pandemic has affected researchers across the academic spectrum, but it’s had an especially significant impact on the intensely personal, international nature of the Center’s work. “We’ve really had to rethink how we do everything,” Seelinger said. “We can’t travel, we can’t interview folks in person, and we’re supervising our army of graduate students remotely. We couldn’t even have our Center launch last April!”

“Research-wise, we can manage,” Seelinger added, although navigating Zoom meetings with study participants across international time zones has been a challenge. “You have to schedule meetings differently because your interviewee is eight hours ahead of you. You have to build rapport in a totally different way,” she said. “You have to think, ‘What is my face doing?’ and ‘Does this come across like actual eye contact?’”

Despite the roadblocks, the Center has been a major benefit to many students, including Lacy Broemel. “When I came to the Brown School, I was eager to continue my education focusing on people and policy by connecting with individuals and their life experiences,” said Broemel, whose concentration is in social and economic development. She learned about the Center last spring and reached out to Seelinger and Uyttewaal, who invited her to co-chair the advisory board with Grace Day, a law student. Broemel had other roles at the Center, including participating in a literature review about the impact of conflict-related sexual violence and reparations; and participating in a Center-hosted discussion of immigration policy in the Biden administration.

“The Center has been a wonderful part of my time here at the Brown School,” said Broemel, who plans to move to Washington D.C. after graduation and work in refugee and policy advocacy. “Working with the Center has expanded my field of understanding and helped prepare me for my next career.”