(Coming at you straight from Prof Marnie Brady. Enjoy!)

Special guests Athena Viscusi, LICSW, and Maria Dohers of Médecins Sans Frontières/Doctors Without Borders gave students a view into global social work practice. The class discussed social work perspectives involving cultural humility, self-care, cross-NGO partnerships, and humanitarian intervention within the context of militarism, climate change, and refugee dislocation. Athena Viscusi, a clinical social worker with MSF, provides support to field workers before, after, and during deployment to crisis zones abroad. She shared about her own fieldwork as a psychosocial mental health worker with MSF in Liberia, Palestine, Central African Republic, Myanamar, and Haiti, among other countries. During the height of the Ebola epidemic in Liberia, Athena supported a program for survivors, immune to the disease, to act as mental health counselors to encourage and support those who were still afflicted. She was joined at MMC by a graduate student at Columbia University’s School of Social Work, Marie Dohrs, who shared about her previous work supporting immigrants and refugees here and abroad. Marie explained the steps she took in her process of applying to graduate school.

MMC students & Prof. Brady express their deep appreciation for the important and urgent work of MSF in the world, and for the time the guests spent with us discussing their own professional career paths and the challenges in global social work.

(Yay guest speakers! Thanks for reading, have a great weekend, spread kindness everywhere you go and be brave.)