As an astute social worker and professional policy advocate, you must be adept at identifying social problems that exist in your community or in an agency or organization with which you are acquainted. Your selection and investigation of a specific social problem serves as the foundation for your process of creating and implementing a policy that addresses that social problem.

In this Assignment, you will identify a current social problem based on your personal and professional interests and consider its historical impact on populations, as well as potential steps for identifying a policy that proposes contemporary solutions to the problem. Your selection of a social problem and historical review of impacts will serve as a foundation for your Final Project Assignment—a Social Change Project—in the course (due in Week 10).

Resources

Be sure to review the Learning Resources before completing this activity. Click the weekly resources link to access the resources.

WEEKLY RESOURCES

To Prepare:

· Review Chapter 2 of the Jansson text.

· Focus on “Policy Advocacy Challenge 2.4” (pp. 39–40) for websites and examples of different ways to think about the relationship between social problems and policy.

· Identify a social problem—for example, food insecurity, domestic violence, child maltreatment, policing, and so on—that you would like to investigate throughout the course. This can be a problem that has personal or professional meaning to you. You will use the social problem as the foundation for your Final Project Assignment—a Social Change Project— due in Week 10 (although, you will work on it in multiple Assignments throughout the course).

· Review the websites listed in the Resources for Policy and Advocacy Work document in the Learning Resources this week.

· Search for and select at least three sources related to the social problem you identified.

· One source can be a government or other professional website.

· At least two of the sources must be scholarly articles or studies from reputable journals.

Assignment below:

Submit a 2- to 3-page paper to complete Part 1 of your Social Change Project.

· Describe a current social problem and the vulnerable population it impacts.

· How/when has this problem been identified historically, and what were the actions taken to address this concern?

· How have the populations affected by the social problem changed over time?

· How might this social problem be incongruent with social work values/ethics?

· Describe the next steps for how you will identify a policy.

Be sure to incorporate the sources you found related to your selected social problem using standard APA format.