Native agency to train its own child welfare workers

CBC News

A Manitoba aboriginal child welfare agency is set to launch the province's first native-run social work diploma program for aboriginal child welfare workers.

Officials with Dakota Ojibway Child and Family Services say they were so dissatisfied with existing university social work programs that they decided to run their own.

Yellowquill College, a First Nations-run college in Winnipeg, will start the Dakota Ojibway CFS's two-year diploma program in the fall.

'It's a whole different ball game'

Executive director Bobbi Pompana, who founded the new training program, said her agency is seeking more aboriginal social workers to deal with aboriginal families.

University social work graduates often don't have the right skills to work in native-run child welfare agencies, she said. "It's a whole different ball game, you know, working with First Nations people."

Pompana said she has tried to convince the University of Manitoba to revise its social work degree program to address the needs of native agencies but officials were "not too open to change."

"Child and family service agencies are a very large employer of people who graduate with social work degrees," she said.

"So when we suggest changes and we say, 'This is what people need to know to work for us,' then you'd think they'd modify what they do. Unfortunately, that hasn't happened."

University official dismisses criticism

But Robert Mullaly, the university's dean of social work, said he believes Pompana's criticisms are unwarranted, arguing that his program is one of the best in Canada.

"People acknowledge that we're leaders with respect to delivering social work education to aboriginal populations and aboriginal communities," he said.

Mullaly said individual agencies cannot expect the university to provide job-specific training and he warned that it may be dangerous for the Dakota Ojibway CFS to rely too much on workers without a degree.

"I worry that we have these programs that are kind of homegrown in an agency and you expect people to carry out professional social work at a competent level," he said.

But Elsie Flett, executive director of the First Nations of Southern Manitoba Child and Family Services Authority, said she believes graduates of the new program will be capable of doing their jobs.