Social Welfare Policy in a Changing World, Second Edition offers an engaging, student-friendly approach that links policy and practice, while employing a critical analytic lens to U.S. social welfare policy. With particular attention to disparities based on class, race/ethnicity, ability, sexual orientation and gender, Shannon R. Lane, Elizabeth S. Palley, and Corey S. Shdaimah assess the impact of policies at the micro, meso, and macro levels. The authors provide a brief foundation in history, the policy process, and theory, while primarily helping students understand how policy shapes their lives, communities, and clients. Connecting description, theoretical analysis, and advocacy, this text challenges readers to critically assess policy development, its consequences, and future implications. Students will come away with a newfound understanding of how to use the political process to address social justice issues and advocate for meaningful policy change.

Working mothers are common in the United States. In over half of all two-parent families, both parents work, and womenOCOs paychecks on average make up 35 percent of their familiesOCO incomes. Most of these families yearn for available and affordable child careOCobut although most developed countries offer state-funded child care, it remains scarce in the United States. And even in prosperous times, child care is rarely a priority for U.S. policy makers. Ina In Our Hands: The Struggle for U.S. Child Care Policy, Elizabeth Palley and Corey S. Shdaimah explore the reasons behind the relative paucity of U.S. child care and child care support. Why, they ask, are policy makers unable to convert widespread need into a feasible political agenda? They examine the history of child care advocacy and legislation in the United States, from the Child Care Development Act of the 1970s that was vetoed by Nixon through the Obama administrationOCOs Child Care Development Block Grant. The book includes data from interviews with 23 prominent child care and early education advocates and researchers who have spent their careers seeking expansion of child care policy and funding and an examination of the legislative debates around key child care bills of the last half-century. Palley and Shdaimah analyze the special interest and niche groups that have formed around existing policy, arguing that such groups limit the possibility for debate around U.S. child care policy. Ultimately, they conclude, we do not need to make minor changes to our existing policies. We need a revolution."

While many young people become lawyers for the big bucks, others are motivated by the pursuit of social justice, seeking to help people for whom legal services are financially, socially, or politically inaccessible. These progressive lawyers often bring a considerable degree of idealism to their work, and many leave the field due to insurmountable red tape and spiraling disillusionment. But what about those who stay? And what do their clients think? Negotiating Justice explores how progressive lawyers and their clients negotiate the dissonance between personal idealism and the realities of a system that doesn’t often champion the rights of the poor. Corey S. Shdaimah draws on over fifty interviews with urban legal service lawyers and their clients to provide readers with a compelling behind-the-scenes look at how different notions of practice can present significant barriers for both clients and lawyers working with limited resources, often within a legal system that many view as fundamentally unequal or hostile. Through consideration of the central themes of progressive lawyering—autonomy, collaboration, transformation, and social change—Shdaimah presents a subtle and complex tableau of the concessions both lawyers and clients often have to make as they navigate the murky and resistant terrains of the legal system and their wider pursuits of justice and power.

Collaborating with community members adds a critical dimension to social work research, providing practitioners with intimate knowledge of a community's goals and needs while equipping community advocates with vital skills for social change. Sharing the inspiring story of one such partnership, Corey Shdaimah, Roland Stahl, and Sanford F. Schram recount their efforts working with an affordable housing coalition in Philadelphia, helping activists research low-income home ownership and repair. Their collaboration helped create the Philadelphia Housing Trust Fund, which funnels millions of dollars to people in need. This volume describes the origins of their partnership and its growth, including developing tensions and their diffusion in ways that contributed to the research. The authors personalize methods of research and the possibilities for advocacy, ultimately connecting their encounters to more general, critical themes. Building on the field's commitment to social justice, they effectively demonstrate the potential of change research to facilitate widespread, long-term difference and improve community outcomes.

"This book draws on interviews and observations from two court-affiliated prostitution diversion programs and a nonprofit agency following participants through court, prison, probation, programming, and returns to their lives. They compare the forces coercing women towards and away from sex work"--

Gale Researcher Guide for: Sociological Imagination is selected from Gale's academic platform Gale Researcher. These study guides provide peer-reviewed articles that allow students early success in finding scholarly materials and to gain the confidence and vocabulary needed to pursue deeper research.