How to Aid a Million Refugees By Richard Wilkinson Professor Frederick Ahearn (seated at left) signs the memorandum of understanding to offer Catholic University’s M.T.S.W. degree program in the Philippines. Seated with him are Abas Candao of the Bangsamoro Development Agency and CUA alumnus Steven Muncy. Behind them are four social work professors/leaders. Beginning next May, CUA’s National Catholic School of Social Service is opening a branch campus of sorts a long ways from Washington, D.C. … 8,700 miles away, to be exact, in the Philippines, on its large southern island of Mindanao. The Filipino social workers there are asking for CUA training to help them with a big project: rebuilding the homes, livelihoods and lives of a million people driven into refugee camps by a civil war between the national government and Muslim rebels fighting for political autonomy. Over the next six years, NCSSS and its professors will be offering two-year Master of Teaching in Social Work (M.T.S.W.) degrees to 75 Mindanaoan social work professors and leaders, all of whom currently have only bachelor’s degrees in social work. Classes will be offered during two three-week sessions in the summer (May 20–June 9 and Aug. 4–22) and another three-week session at Christmastime. These classes will take place in a part of Mindanao that is now enjoying a cease-fire but that is still potentially dangerous. Professors won’t be able to take strolls outside and will need to be chauffeured from their Cotabato City hotel to a classroom site in that city of 200,000 inhabitants. It’ll be a 9-a.m.-to-8-p.m. job, six days a week, during each three-week session. With potential disincentives such as a grueling 24-hour flight from D.C., the possibility of political instability in Mindanao, long teaching hours, and the sacrifice of time during summer break and the Christmas season, one might imagine that few CUA professors would sign on. The opposite is true, however. Eleven of the social work school’s 19 professors have volunteered to teach a three-week “semester” sometime in the next six years. “It will be an exciting opportunity to fulfill the mission of social work, which is to enhance human well-being, with particular attention to the needs and empowerment of people who are vulnerable, oppressed and living in poverty,” says Assistant Professor of Social Work Laura Daughtery, who plans to be one of the two CUA faculty members who will teach during the program’s first session that begins in late May 2007. AusAID, Australia’s overseas aid program, has agreed to make all this possible by paying for the CUA professors’ airfare, room and board, and stipend. Catholic University, for its part, will waive all tuition charges for the social workers who will go through the two-year degree program during the next six years. Central Mindanao has historically been self-governing and Muslim. About 70 years ago, however, the Philippine central government began to exert political control over the region and encouraged Christians from northern parts of the nation to move there. In the 1960s the Moro (i.e., Muslim) community of Mindanao rebelled because of its loss of land and independence, leading to more than 40 years of war. More than 120,000 people have reportedly died in these wars, and millions have been repeatedly displaced. With a cease-fire now in place, the national government and the Moro Islamic Liberation Front are working toward the signing of a final peace agreement. “This effort by CUA involves us in the peace process in Mindanao, and is in line with the mission of the university and its school of social service,” says Professor of Social Work Frederick Ahearn, who initiated and is overseeing the project. “Our work will serve to help resettle thousands of internally displaced victims of the war, assist them in identifying their goals for redeveloping their communities, and instill an ethic of human rights and social justice. We will also train a cadre of social work faculty at three state universities in the conflict-affected area, thereby assisting them to improve the quality of social work education in Mindanao and train hundreds of social workers to work in the resettlement and social development efforts. An added benefit of our collaboration will be exposure to Muslim culture and the Islamic context of social work interventions.” As a result of CUA’s program, 75 Filipino social work professors and leaders will learn the social development theory and skills that are important to deal with huge numbers of people returning to their destroyed communities. They’ll be prepared to work with individuals, families, organizations and communities in such a situation. They’ll also learn how to write grant proposals and do project management and evaluation.   “Probably where they’re weakest is in the area of theory,” says Ahearn. “To be a good social work practitioner you have to be guided by philosophy and a wide range of theory. Theory allows you make a diagnosis of what the problem is. Then, given the result of the assessment, you pick the appropriate intervention. “We don’t pretend to go in and say, ‘This is what to do and how you must do it,’ ” Ahearn adds. “We’re going to go in and talk about the theories, techniques and approaches. In the evening, a Muslim social work professor from Mindanao will dialogue with the students and the CUA professors about the application of course content and how to make it consistent with Muslim values.” In addition to possessing a bachelor's degree in social work, the enrollees must be fluent in English to be accepted into the CUA program. That should not be a great hurdle because English is one of the two national languages of the Philippines. Steven Muncy, second from left, is the CUA alumnus whose humanitarian organization is helping thousands of Filipinos rebuild their lives with the help of multimillion-dollar grants from the Post-Conflict Fund of the World Bank. Although offering a master’s degree in a country thousands of miles away sounds like a stretch, it’s actually something that CUA’s social work school has done before. From the late 1980s to the early 1990s, the school offered a similar M.T.S.W. degree program in Santiago, Chile, for social work professors at 16 Chilean universities. That program, like the upcoming one in the Philippines, involved some danger. During those years, Chilean dictator Augusto Pinochet had imposed an evening curfew and CUA professors had to stay in their hotel after dark. The request for CUA to offer a degree program in the Philippines came from CUA alumnus Steven Muncy, M.S.W. 1994, whose humanitarian organization, Community and Family Services International, is helping to resettle hundreds of thousands of Mindanaoan refugees. Muncy told Professor Ahearn in 2004 that CUA’s Chilean degree program needed to be introduced in Mindanao. Such a program could prepare Mindanao’s social work professors and social workers for the challenge of helping people rebuild their destroyed villages, homes, livelihoods and schools. Muncy says he liked CUA’s Chilean model for three reasons: 1) it went to the people, instead of making the people go to the program; 2) it equipped the locals with the capacity to solve their own problems; and 3) the envisaged impact was long-term and sustainable. “It was clear that we would need to take graduate-level social work education to the people if we really wanted to build a cadre of culturally sensitive and community-acceptable social workers to enhance or develop services for those most adversely affected by armed conflict,” explains Muncy. Ahearn took Muncy’s request to James Zabora, dean of NCSSS, and to Provost John Convey, and they both gave the idea a green light. After multiple trips to the Philippines to iron out the arrangements, Ahearn reported in a September social work faculty meeting that the program would actually become a reality.  Professor Daughtery remembers the response: “The social work professors broke into a spontaneous round of applause.” Back to Top