Reflection Paper 1

Reflection Paper 1

Madeleine Bourgeois

Intro to Social Work

Reflection Paper 1

I will be doing my community service at the Jubilee Soup Kitchen. I expect that I’m going to be doing a lot of cooking, serving, and cleaning. I might be doing some work in the food pantry, I also think I’ll be interacting with a lot of homeless people, so it will be a bit of a new experience for me. I might get to have some conversations with the people, or they might want nothing to do with me. It all depends on the person that comes in and the type of day they might be having.

I know that some people regard the homeless as people who have made bad choices in life like drugs or crime (and some of them might have) and that they deserve to be where they are, so they tend to disregard them and cross the street when they see them on the sidewalk. Most pity the homeless but do nothing about it, and go back to living their lives and only worrying about it when they might run into them on the streets. Others may have the same view that I have, which is more open and accepting. I know that some homeless people have gotten to where they are because of addiction but I also know that some of those people also regret their decisions, are trying to get clean or even have been for some time, and just want a fresh start. And that’s harder to do when people around you won’t even look at you let alone hear what you have to say. Some people haven’t even had an addiction problem, and were forced out of their homes in some other way, like disaster or family issues. I want to believe that I will treat every person who comes into the kitchen the same, no matter how they look or what they’ve done in the past. I like to believe that everyone has good in them until they prove me wrong.

A generalist social worker would most likely work with the homeless population by working at the macrosystem, mezzosystem, and microsystem levels. In the macrosystem, she might try to work with lawmakers to create jobs...