For Immediate Release
Contact:
Lydell Thomas
Manager, Marketing and Communications
1.703.519.2057, lthomas@cswe.org
Alexandria, VA, January 8, 2013 – The Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) has been awarded a $1.2 million grant from the John A. Hartford Foundation to fund the CSWE Gero-Ed Center for the next 3 years.
The grant will fund the Gero-Ed Center’s mission to sustain and advance visible, strategic, national social work leadership that bridges practice and education to prepare social workers with the competencies to work with older adults, their families, and their caregivers.
“We are delighted to have 3 additional years of transition funding from Hartford to sustain our signature functions—the Gero-Ed Track and our website—while pursuing new funding partnerships that promote our mission,” said Nancy Hooyman, co-principal investigator of the CSWE Gero-Ed Center and Hooyman professor of Gerontology at the University of Washington.
The Gero-Ed Center aims to build on its accomplishments of the past 9 years to ensure that all social work students have the knowledge and skills to support older adults’ well-being in a cost-effective, accessible, and quality manner. The center will collaborate with Patricia Volland, principal investigator of the Hartford Partnership Program for Aging Education (HPPAE), to implement the HPPAE - Veterans Health Administration partnership within CSWE and integrate HPPAE field-based resources with Gero-Ed’s classroom materials. Gero-Ed Center leadership and staff will pursue new strategic funding partnerships that bridge geriatric practice and education, promote policy innovations for eldercare workforce development, and create new models of interprofessional collaboration to prepare the next generation of social work leaders.
“CSWE is grateful to the John A. Hartford Foundation for its support of the Gero-Ed Center during this time of transition,” said Darla Spence Coffey, CSWE president. “We are particularly pleased with the plan to integrate the HPPAE program into the Gero-Ed Center, bringing together the best practices from both initiatives to strengthen social work education in this area.”
Founded in 1929, the John A. Hartford Foundation is a committed champion of training, research, and service system innovations that promote the health and independence of America’s older adults. Through its grant making, the foundation seeks to strengthen the nation’s capacity to provide effective, affordable care to this rapidly increasing older population by educating “aging-prepared” health professionals (such as physicians, nurses, and social workers) and developing innovations that improve and better integrate health and supportive services. John A. Hartford and his brother, George L. Hartford, both former chief executives of the Great Atlantic & Pacific Tea Company, left the bulk of their estates to the foundation on their deaths in the 1950s. Additional information about the foundation and its programs is available at www.jhartfound.org.
CSWE is a nonprofit national association representing more than 2,500 individual members as well as graduate and undergraduate programs of professional social work education. Founded in 1952, this partnership of educational and professional institutions, social welfare agencies, and private citizens is recognized by the Council on Higher Education Accreditation as the sole accrediting agency for social work education in the United States.
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