Social work gets more specialized
- By Wu Jin
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E-mail China.org.cn, May 1, 2012
According to Xie, most of the travelers were happy to join the trip. "When coming close to the nature, people can easily forget and forgive many things that they suffer in a much materialized world," she explained. A boy cried when he washed his own clothes in a creek, saying he understood how hard his mother worked washing his clothes for almost 13 years.
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A social worker teaches a handicapped person how to wash clothes. [Courtesy of Pudong Association of Social Workers] |
These first steps are inspiring, but the road to real progress remains hard. Most of the social worker organizations in China's mainland are continuously nagged by money. A majority of them are financed by the government, which provides them with an annual budget. This requires social workers to revise their programs each year in order to prevent a loss in interest in funding. The system has a negative impact on the sustainability of each program.
Xie once organized handicapped people to weave woolen scarves and sweaters to needy families and senior nursery houses, and many middle-aged women were highly enthusiastic about the program. A woman made many contributions to the effort even though she had only one hand. Among the piles of wool the disabled people found their values, but their happiness lasted no more than two years as the program had to be revised in order to secure annual funding.
Without many channels for funding, social work is suffering a constant loss of talent, who are forced to switch to more lucrative professions under the pressures of life. According to Xie, most social work organizations that are subsidized by the government can only use 10 percent of their annual budget on wages for their employees. Meanwhile, the social workers financed by Social Welfare Department in Hong Kong have more flexibility in using funds. Usually a senior social worker there can take in more than 400,000 yuan (US$63,492) per year if he/she is a talented professional.
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