Author’s Night: "Social Work with Immigrants and Refugees, Second Edition: Legal Issues, Clinical Skills, and Advocacy"

Join us at an Author’s Night featuring Academy Fellow Elaine P. Congress, DSW, LCSW, and Fernando Chang-Muy, MA, JD, presenting their book, Social Work with Immigrants and Refugees, Second Edition: Legal Issues, Clinical Skills, and Advocacy. This timely text deals with both policy and practice as to working with immigrants and refugees. The chapters present a multidisciplinary analysis of immigration laws and policies, services to immigrants and refugees, and views on the nature of the immigration experience.

The text offers tips to practitioners for plans for assistance that entail collaboration with immigration attorneys and service organizations, and how to connect the legal issues with the practice situations. Specific chapters deal with physical and mental health, education, employment, special populations (women, elderly, LBGT), cultural competence, and practice.

The editors and contributors have expertise in the field of immigration are lawyers, social workers, clinical practitioners, administrators, and academics.

Moderator: Debra M. McPhee, PhD, Dean, Graduate School of Social Service, Fordham University

Elaine P. Congress, DSW, LCSW is Professor and Associate Dean at Fordham University Graduate School of Social Service in New York City and a past Director of the Doctoral Program. Dr. Congress has been President of the New York City Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, served on the national Board of the National Association of Social Workers and as chair of the Publications Committee for the Council on Social Work Education. A Fellow at the New York Academy of Medicine, Dr. Congress also serves on the Governing Council of the American Association of Public Health (APHA) and at the United Nations (UN) she represents the NGO International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW) with over 750,000 social workers and over 100 professional social work associations around the world. For the last five years Dr. Congress has also been a director for the Fordham Center for Nonprofit Leaders a master and executive education training program jointly sponsored with the Fordham Graduate School of Social Service and the Gabelli School of Business. Dr. Congress has written extensively in the area of cultural diversity, public health, social work ethics, and social work education, including ten books (two of them translated into Korean) and over fifty professional journal articles and book chapters.  She is the co-editor with Fernando Chang-Muy of Social Work with Immigrants and Refugees: Legal Issues, Clinical Skills, and Advocacy (2008, 2016, Springer Publishing Company) and has a podcast about this book. Dr. Congress has published three editions of her book Multicultural Perspectives in Working with Families (Springer Publishing Company, 1997, 2005, 2013). She developed the culturagram, a family assessment tool for assessing and working with families from different cultural backgrounds. 

Fernando Chang-Muy, MA, JD is the Thomas O'Boyle Lecturer at the University of Pennsylvania School of Law where he teaches Refugee Law. He also teaches courses on Non Profit Management and Immigration for Social Workers at Penn’s Graduate School of Social Policy and Practice.

In addition to teaching, he combines his experience in academia and operations, as principal and founder of Solutions International, providing independent management consulting, facilitation and training to philanthropic institutions, non profit organizations and government entities. His areas of expertise include designing and facilitating large group, task-focused strategic planning, board governance, staff internal communications and performance, and resource development.

He has served as Legal Officer with both the Office of the UN High Commissioner for Refugee (UNHCR) and the UN World Health Organization (WHO), AIDS Program. Before joining the UN, he was a staff attorney at Community Legal Services in Philadelphia serving as Director of the Southeast Asian Refugee Project, providing free legal aid to low-income people in Philadelphia. He is also past founding director of the Liberty Center for Survivors of Torture, a project of Lutheran Children and Family Services, established to serve newcomers fleeing human rights violations.

He is author of numerous articles on diverse topics dealing with immigration & refugees, public health and management, and is co-editor of the text Social Work with Immigrants and Refugees (NY: Springer Publication, 2008). He is a graduate of Loyola, Georgetown, Antioch and Harvard Law School’s Program on Negotiation. He is a 2011 recipient of the Penn Law Public Interest Supervisor/Advisor of the Year Award honoring outstanding project supervisors and advisors.