Volunteer Program a Boon to Social Workers and the People They Help

Lynn Schwartz, a La Mesa mother of two, said she knows what it’s like to be young and saddled with overwhelming burdens and decisions.

So last year, after contemplating attending school to become a social worker, she decided to try her hand at such work by becoming a volunteer with the county’s Children’s Services Division.

In a novel program developed a year ago to ease the ever-increasing burden on county social workers, Schwartz and 15 other women and men volunteer to spend time with troubled families, especially children who have been physically or mentally abused and are now under the supervision of the county.

Schwartz, who was one of the first volunteers to join the program and has since worked with eight families, often shares with her “clients” her experiences of parenting her two children, an 11-year-old son who is mentally and physically retarded, and a 5-year-old daughter.

“I think that anybody who has a family and brought up children has something to offer to these families,” said Schwartz, a 33-year-old native of South Africa who has lived in San Diego County for four years. “I know what it feels like to deal with problems on your own.”

The families the volunteers work with are frequently poor and have few resources. Most are headed by single woman with little education, women who feel they have lost control over their lives.

Many of the parents have abused or neglected their children, are former drug addicts or alcoholics or no longer have custody of their children.

But one thing is certain: all of them want to improve their situation, said Patti Satin-Jacobs, a social worker who coordinates the volunteer program. The program is known as Family Assistants and is part of the county’s Department of Social Services. Satin-Jacobs screens the volunteer applicants and coordinates which family or children will be assigned to each volunteer, who must make a six-month commitment.

“The family assistants don’t replace the social workers, they enhance the services of the social workers,” Satin-Jacobs said.

The volunteers, she said, are by no means the answer to the problem of child abuse in San Diego County. But she says that the program can provide a vital one-on-one contact with abusive families “that the social worker could never realistically accomplish.”

Becoming a friend to these parents and children is perhaps the key to the program, Satin-Jacobs said. Besides field trips, a family assistant can help the families with a variety of day-to-day problems that can seem overwhelming to an isolated single-parent.

Finding a bicycle for an adolescent, providing child care for a toddler so a mother can make dinner in the evening, helping a parent sign up for night school--those are some of the tasks the volunteers have helped their families conquer.

“This program helps these families see the world as a kinder place,” Satin-Jacobs said.

Usually, the volunteer will spend 3 to 10 hours a week with the clients, doing such simple things as listening to the problems of the parents or taking the children on a trip to the park or zoo. Volunteers also perform clerical chores and can help child protective services recruit more foster families.

The combination of a post-Proposition 13 fiscal drought and a dramatic increase in child-abuse reports has overburdened social workers to the point where they are unable to provide daily contact with clients and help families with tasks such as child care or night school, Satin-Jacobs said.

Social worker Edie Davis said family assistants can visit a family as many as four times a week while the social workers are unable, because of their caseloads, to visit more than once a week and are required by law to see each client just once each month.

“It’s like a little miracle,” said Davis, who has been a social worker for six years. “We get direct input from someone that was in the home and watched the interaction between family members.”

Some 135 volunteers are used by child protective services to fill the gap left by overwhelmed social workers and to help with child care at Hillcrest Receiving Home, where the most severely abused children are taken and cared for until foster care can be arranged.

A recent report prepared by the Public Welfare Advisory Board subcommittee on children’s services said that volunteers may be the only solution to ease the social workers’ burden.

By next year, Satin-Jacobs said, she would like to see the number of volunteers double.

“Of all the sadness that these people are living in--and then to see the joy that comes over their faces by taking them to a place that they would normally never get to,” said Norma Teipel, a volunteer who enjoys taking her clients to Balboa Park and Mission Bay Park.

“A lot of my friends say, ‘Isn’t it depressing working with all those abused children?’ and I say we could all focus on the negative but I choose to focus on the positive,” said Schwartz. “The greatest thing about being in the program is that everything you do is appreciated.”