Pioneering Contributions
Janet E. Black has spent her career striving to make the social work profession a less competitive and more collegial place. Over the course of 40 years, she has worked to increase the collaboration in curriculum development, training, and treatment delivery systems. Black’s goal was to establish social work as an inclusive, cooperative, noncompetitive network of programs, agencies, faculty, staff, and students that work together to serve the greater good. Black spent part of her career serving the community at California State University - Long Beach (CSULB) as a field education expert, Professor Emerita, and Director of the Department of Social Work. She helped found the social work program and assisted in getting its accreditation and ongoing funding.
Black’s work to make the social work field more cooperative led to greater involvement from community partners, benefitting students even further. During her time as the Director of Field Work, she worked with the directors of the University of Southern California (USC) and University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) Field Work programs to train field instructors in similar ways across the universities. Black also was an early advocate and practitioner in distance education. Her publications and presentations informed fellow social workers about information technology and distance education as ways to keep social workers up-to-date across a broad geographic area. She was a part of a national distance education grant that enabled social work programs to be accessed by social workers in California’s rural and more remote urban areas. This led to more qualified social workers and resulted in all universities involved developing their own on site MSW programs.
Black continued to serve the social work education community by consulting for the Mental Health Initiative of the California Social Work Education Center (CalSWEC) for 10 years. While there, she developed the Mental Health Curriculum Competencies, which let students work in the California Public Health System. She secured a grant from the Southern California Regional Partnership to develop core competencies for in nine counties. In 2016, Professor Black was inducted into the California Social Work Hall of Distinction having received the highest number of support letters of anyone in the history of the award.
Career Highlights
Black was a sought-after academic both for her writing and presentations, and her competencies including field education, gerontology, behavioral health/mental health, child welfare, program design and development, cross cultural supervision and practice, and curriculum development in mental health. Her first job after earning her MSW was directing the long-term care and placement practice at the Sepulveda Veterans Administration Hospital, where she worked for 14 years. In this position, Black worked to help the veterans and observed how their care was impacted by the staff’s education and practice skills. From there she went on to begin her career at CSULB.
During the late 1980s, she helped develop the Heart of Social Work Awards to honor and celebrate field instructors. She felt it was important to recognize the value of caring that is by instructors who guide students through their field placements. Black designed and developed a series of core competencies for clinical professionals and collaborative behavioral health service providers for the Southern California Regional Partnership, made up of 11 counties in Southern California. She presented a juried paper to the Council on Social Work Education (CSWE), “Partners in Transformation: Innovative Solutions to the Mental Health Workforce Crisis,” exemplifying her leadership in promoting social work relevancy in a rapidly-changing world. Further, Professor Black garnered millions of dollars for student stipends.
A community service activist, she served on the CSWE National Commission on Field Education, the Los Angeles City/County Area Agency on Aging Task Force, the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health Older Adults Task Force, and on the Board of Directors of Campfire Boys and Girls of Los Angeles.
Biographic Data
Black received her BA in Sociology from Whittier College in 1969 and her MSW from the USC School of Social Work in 1971.
Significant Achievements and Awards
- Meritorious Performance and Professional Promise Award - California State University, Long Beach - May 1991 and 1992; and,
- California Social Work Hall of Distinction, 2016
Significant Publications
- Black Janet E., (2006). CalSWEC and the Mental Health Stipend program: Addressing the Mental Health Workforce Crisis in California. NASW California News, 32(8) Pg. 19.
- Black, J.E., Kelly, J.J. & Rice, S. (2005). A Model of Group Work in Retirement Communities, in B. Haight & F. Gibson, (Eds.) Burnside's Working with Older Adults: Group Process and Techniques. Boston: Jones and Bartlett Publishers.
- Black, J.E. and Cohen, B. (2000). A journey into the future: MSW distance education in California. Reflections: Narratives of Professional Helping. Special Issue, May 2000.
- Cohen, B. & Black, J.E. (1998). From a distance: The partnership between field education and distance education MSW program offerings. In L. Ginsberg & J. Coe (Eds.). Information Technologies for Social Work Education and Practice. South Carolina: College of Social Work, University of South Carolina. Pp. 99-108.
- Black, J., Maki, M. & Nunn, J. (1997). Does race affect the social work student-field instructor relationship? The Clinical Supervisor, !'6_(1), pp. 39-54.