Early Childhood Enrichment Program
What is social welfare? Social welfare can be described in a multitude of ways, but, at its core refers to the well-being of people living in collective societies.
This concept ideally should apply to everyone living in a community. People’s levels or “amounts” of social welfare often relate to systems of stratification and access to adequate shelter and food, health care, employment, sanitation, and guarantees of clean air, water, and safe food.
Many would also include in their description services such as education and transportation, and social conditions such as public safety, freedom from discrimination, freedom of expression, and freedom to practice any religious belief (or no religion).
This expanded definition incorporates some of the fundamental concepts of (universal) human rights. While all societies provide for varying degrees of social welfare, some often promote the social welfare of different social groups to the detriment and social exclusion of other groups.
What is social justice? Social justice is a powerful ideal, but its meaning is many-sided and highly contested. As a moral ideal, one’s beliefs about social justice and one’s definition of it are rooted in one’s ideological stance.
Yet our personal conceptions of a just society and the ways we believe it can best be achieved make no sense unless they are connected to the larger social and political ideologies that inform them: ideas about the economic structure of society; the nature of the state’s responsibility to its citizens; the extent of citizens’ obligations to one another and to the state; and citizenship itself.
All of us have been raised in different community contexts that shaped our understanding of and beliefs about the role of government in ensuring the social welfare of its people and promoting a just society.
Family, education, mass media, religious institutions, and peer groups are primary influences on our beliefs about social problems and the proper function of government (especially its role in promoting social welfare).
This assignment asks you to reflect on your own values and beliefs about the role of economics, government, and the relationship between social problems and social welfare (policy) in the United States. In a short essay address the following items:
TOPIC-Early Childhood Enrichment Programs,
Provide a description of the social problem, identifying who is impacted (i.e., the population), specifically how they are impacted, and who are the significant proponents/opponents of the issue.
Next, review the issue/social problem from the viewpoint of two different political ideologies, for example: social liberal, social democrat, neoliberal or neoconservative.
Describe your own economic and political “philosophy,”, especially in relation to the social issue discussed in your paper.
Explain how your own values and beliefs resemble and/or differ from the viewpoints described.
Explain the ecological factors and your individual experiences that have influenced the development of your own economic and political “philosophy.
Incorporate those sensitizing events in your life that have either changed your views or reinforced them on the topic of social welfare, poverty, the role of government, etc.
What stance has social work historically taken on the social welfare issue chosen? Based on the SW Code of Ethics, what political philosophies seem most consistent with our professional values.
What area of contradictions do you see between the values our professions espouses and the translation of those values into practice? Include a brief description of the direction our field should ideally be moving in, based on our core values.