Wednesday, December 4, 2024
Social work interns are stepping into critical roles at the Uniondale Public Library, providing essential support to the community. The initiative, a collaboration with Adelphi University, is an effort to both enhance the interns’ education and help local residents.
“I think there are services that people in our community need that we just can’t offer,” Deborah Kinirons, the Uniondale Library’s community outreach librarian, said. “They’re in our building, they need help.”
The library was primarily interested in the partnership, Director Mara Marin explained, because its staff wanted to offer more services to patrons, but, she said, “We’re limited in staff and time,” and can really only offer resources.
“A social worker might also have skills that we don’t necessarily have,” Marin added.
Natasha Holder is one of the facility’s two social work interns. Since she began the program two months ago, she has helped a number of community members grappling with food insecurity, housing concerns and questions about resumés and job applications.
“I like helping people to see their potential, and then for them to know that there is empowerment,” Holder said. “It’s really just to link people with services.”
One man recently approached Holder in the library, she explained, and said simply, “I’m hungry.” In order to get him the help he needed, she asked him how far away he lived, whether he had accessible transportation, what his general eating habits were and where he could prepare food if he needed to.
She also asked if he was looking for a food bank or a soup kitchen, because, Holder said, “some people don’t realize they’re two different things.” Soup kitchens provide food that people can eat on-site, while food banks and pantries typically distribute food for people to take home.
Once Holder got all the necessary information, she looked for food banks and soup kitchens in the area that the man could get to, which he did.
“I was able to contact a good amount of food pantries, and it was about two or three soup kitchens,” she said, and the man got the help he needed.
Holder said she spends a lot of her time at the library introducing herself to patrons and making herself known at her spot, a table set up near the adult section bookshelves. Library regulars and patrons who have used her services have helped spread the word about available services, she said, and much of the program’s advertising is through word of mouth.
Holder and Shante Murphy, the other social work intern, are both graduate students in Adelphi’s social work program, which sends students to a variety of locations — from libraries and schools to hospitals — to fulfill their internship requirements.
Eight libraries in Nassau County are currently partnered with Adelphi, in a program that began in 2019 with the Baldwin library.
“There’s a real alignment between the ethics of the professions of libraries and social work,” Livia Polise, Adelphi’s director of practicum education, explained, “because social workers are also about meeting people where they’re at, about ensuring people have access to resources.”
Polise and Kinirons both described libraries as a “safe space” and a valuable resource for people in the community, which is why they believe the social work internship initiative is a good fit in these locations.
“(This is) a way for our university to provide service to the community that we’re located in in a very immediate way,” Polise said, “(and) also as a learning opportunity to train social workers broadly, but also more specifically, to build a generation of practitioners that are able to provide services in library settings.”
