Past Courses

Loss and grief are universal aspects of the human experience and much of the work we do as social workers is at its core often about loss and grief. Exploring and increasing your understanding of death-related and non-death related loss and grief can facilitate responding with compassion and competence in interactions with your clients, colleagues, workplaces, and communities.

The workshop will focus on death, loss and grief and explore a diverse range of losses and expressions of grief that occur in our professional and personal lives. We will explore theoretical frameworks of human loss and grief from culturally and philosophically diverse perspectives regarding why and how humans grieve. Various types of supportive interventions to use with clients across the life span will be identified. Finally, personal loss history and clinician resiliency working with grieving clients will be addressed.

This course challenges learners to explore their personal values, beliefs and judgements related to issues of sexuality. Interpersonal practice tools will be offered to assist clients in holding personal beliefs and values and remaining present to client's sexual self, needs, beliefs. Lecture and discussion will examine how implicit bias can limit services and harm clients, particular limits to sexually diverse populations. Sexual health will be considered as a social justice issue.

This course has been developed to meet the Michigan implicit bias training requirements for health professionals.

This workshop will start with an orientation webinar on Friday June 2 from 2-5pm provided over Zoom. The remainder of the course, which is primarily experiential, will meet at the instructor's farm in Dexter, Michigan on Saturday, June 3.

Course Description:
This course provides an experiential opportunity for participants to explore animal-assisted therapeutic activities specifically designed to further a wide range of therapeutic goals with children, adolescents, families and adult clients. Like play therapy and art therapy, animal-assisted interventions, when integrated with evidence-based methods including (but not limited to) CBT and mindfulness, trauma recovery, family systems, cultural-relational and psychodynamic approaches, offer opportunities for people to work through a variety of issues and insecurities related to attachment, trauma, self-esteem and identity concerns, dysregulation, behavioral difficulties, mental illness, developmental disabilities, and family and relational problems. With selected animals as therapy partners, the therapeutic team helps people of all ages and positions foster new alliances, understand more fully existing problems and build practical life-skills to enhance confidence, effectiveness and joy. Presently, animal-assisted therapy is gaining acclaim in the field of mental health intervention and there is a growing body of evidence supporting its efficacy and standards in the field to be explored. This course introduces the theoretical foundations, standards, ethics, evidence, certifications, integration of methods, case examples, evaluation and practical skills involved in partnering with a variety of animals, in particular dogs, cats, goats, pigs, horses and chickens (yes, chickens!)- to provide engaging and effective interventions.

This two-day workshop will present the basic knowledge and skills needed to understand the financial statements and budget of a nonprofit human service organization and its programs. The workshop will cover (1) the conceptual bases of human service organizations (HSOs) and organizational finance/accounting/budgeting, (2) brief introductions on commonly used financial statements at nonprofit HSOs, (3) how to make sense of the information on the financial statements (e.g., ratio calculation), and (4) ways to use information from financial statements in organizational decision-making processes. This workshop will use multiple instructional methods including but not limited to lectures, case studies, discussions, and group exercises.

Participants must attend both days of this course to be eligible for CE hours.

Suicide is a leading cause of preventable death in the United States and worldwide. Nearly 50% of individuals who end life by suicide see a primary care provider within a month of death, yet suicide risk assessment and treatment is consistently difficult in practice. With the majority of mental health services in the US being delivered by social workers, it is imperative that risk assessment and safety planning knowledge and skills are in place for our work with clients with the ultimate goal being to prevent premature suicidal death.

This webinar will discuss and present on suicide as public health issue in the US, risk and protective factors, warning signs, barriers to help-seeking, risk assessment process and risk formulation, safety planning, and cultural humility in risk assessment with use of a clinical case. This workshop is also focused on the adult population.

Social work professionals can play a critical role in promoting healing and resilience among children who have experienced trauma, but to do so, they must be trauma-informed. This course will provide an introduction to a collaborative multi-stakeholder, trauma-informed approach based in theory and concepts of system change. Participants will be encouraged to consider their role within a larger system of creating safe and healthy communities that resist retraumatization.

Understanding and supporting athletes and their overall health and welfare has been a prominent specialty service area that social workers have formally and informally navigated for decades. And today, the need for sports social workers with advanced training has never been more requested across sport settings (youth, collegiate, professional, and geriatric). Research currently suggests that: (1) athletes engage in sport across the lifespan to foster a greater sense of belonging and social connection; (2) athlete mental health needs are increasing and licensed, mental health providers are needed to meet this growing demand; and (3) athletes are using their platform to address social injustices and bring awareness to longstanding disparities across our country. As established agents of change, social workers uphold the profession's mission and core values, while having an expansive scope of practice to improve outcomes for individuals, communities, and the larger society.

In addition to the live schedule, program includes 20 hours of recorded lectures:

Overview: History of Sport Social Work
Adjustment/Transition into College Athletics
Integrated Health in Sports Settings
Body Image & Perfectionism
Multidisciplinary Eating Disorders Team
Psychopharmacology and Navigating USADA & WADA, Drug Testing
Sports & Body Image: Identifying Risks and Recommendations for Clinical Intervention
Injury: Loss of Identity
Post Concussion Care
Sport Psychology: Basic Skills, Preparatory Skills, Performance Skills
Performance Anxiety
Intro to Sport Psychology
Transitioning Out of Sport: Clinical Considerations
Supporting LGBTQ+ Athletes in Sports
Critical Research Perspectives for Contemporary Sport Culture
ADHD and Anxiety
Ensuring Healthy Development for Youth through Sport and Recreation
Athletes Connected: Developing Community-Based Programming
Macro Social Work Practice in Collegiate Sport
Sports in Older Adults: Once an Athlete, Always an Athlete
Understanding Racial Diversity and Social Justice in Sports
Sleep and Sport

This course will examine the impact of previous historical events on the contemporary life of African Americans. The course will cover these historical events: slavery and the triangular trade, Jim Crow, lynchings, the great migration, Marcus Garvey and the New Negro movement, redlining and housing discrimination and the civil rights movement. The course will also investigate how these historical events negatively impact current African American life including: racial differences in wealth accumulation, the impact of racism on physical and mental health, racial socialization of children (“the talk”), discrimination and micro-aggressions, and the impact of mass incarceration on family life.