A Professional for PBH

Inadequate supervision in several local settlement houses hinders more than one hundred Phillips Brooks House volunteers in their efforts to prevent juvenile delinquency. Most understaffed settlement house directors are too involved in other activities to give some volunteers the guidance they need. Feeling very much alone without competent supervision or esprit de corps with other PBH workers, these volunteers lose their zeal and eventually quit, disillusioned.

Although PBH records do not reveal the exact number of drop outs, a conservative guess would be that one out of every three volunteers quits sometime during the year. The effects of dropping out are extremely detrimental to the children at the settlement houses, because the children develop dependencies upon their worker.

Recognizing these problems, PBH's Social Service Committee has taken several preliminary steps to encourage interest among volunteers and to compensate for the severe limitations of professional guidance. Yet as more organizations come to depend critically on PBH's services, so PBH's projects become more ambitious. The problem of inadequate professional supervision plus the prospect of larger undertakings lead to the conclusion that the Social Service Committee needs its own professional supervision.

Unlike the overburdened settlement house director, this professional social worker at PBH could focus his complete attention on specific problems of the volunteers. In short, he could help students deal with questions which now go unanswered and problems which now go unsolved.

Because PBH is unincorporated, it cannot hire a social worker. Three other possibilities, however, could enable PBH to obtain professional guidance. First, PBH can appeal to philanthropic organizations such as Action for Boston Community Development, Permanent Charities, United Community Services, or the Ford Foundation, seeking a grant to pay a social worker to advise the Social Service Committee. The Mental Hospital Committee at PBH already obtains funds this way to pay its professional advisors.

A second and more permanent solution is to petition the University to appoint a member of the Social Relations Department as coordinator of the Social Service Committee. With his knowledge of psychology and sociology, this appointee could serve in the dual capacity of social work coordinator and professor.

As a final alternative, PBH can petition the Corporation to appoint a full time social worker from outside the University. Such an appointment would be unique to Harvard, although in 1960 Yale hired a full time social worker to coordinate Yale's counterpart to PBH.

By obtaining a professional worker in one of these three ways, the Social Service Committee could alleviate its present problems and provide for its future needs. Only with such a worker can the Committee furnish its volunteers with the supervision they need to carry out an effective program in the community.