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Cutler, Vilona Phillippi (1890-1970)

In her role as YWCA Executive Secretary she fought against white privilege social norms and Jim Crow segregation laws that presented multiple indignities for Black Americans. Early in her tenure as YWCA director she recognized that Oklahoma African-American girls and women had the same needs as their white counterparts in Great Britain that gave purpose to the founding of the first YWCA in 1898. In 1941 she worked to establish a small “YWCA Branch” to serve the Black community. In 1945 she was instrumental in convincing her YWCA board of directors to create a multiracial committee for purpose of raising funds to secure a permanent building to house the branch serving the Black community. Her original fund raising idea was to use Black artists for a concert. It is assumed several Black committee members were ministers and that is how idea of using Black church choirs took hold.

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“Brother, Can You Spare a Dime” – 1932

In the song a beggar talks back to the system that stole his job. Jay Gorney said in an interview in 1974 “I didn’t want a song to depress people. I wanted to write a song to make people think. It isn’t a hand-me-out song of ‘give me a dime, I’m starving, I’m bitter’, it wasn’t that kind of sentimentality”. The song asks why the men who built the nation – built the railroads, built the skyscrapers – who fought in the war, who tilled the earth, who did what their nation asked of them should, now that the work is done and their labor no longer necessary, find themselves abandoned and in bread lines.

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The Indispensable Volunteer

The American Red Cross glorifies the volunteer while recognizing the essential place of the professional worker. The tasks of the Red Cross have required many hands. Its services have been nation-wide. Every county has needed its service, and its scheme of service has needed every county’s support and participation. War time; the rehabilitation days for the disabled veteran; the period of great drought, flood, or other disaster; the time of national unemployment—all these have required an army of workers. The professional workers of the world were not enough alone. When Government wheat and cotton distribution reaches all of the counties but 17, a great system of volunteer participation is necessary. This participation of the layman and laywoman must be recognized as vital. There must be that recognition first of all.

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Blackwell, Elizabeth (1821-1910)

At the age of 24, Elizabeth Blackwell had a revelation that changed her life, taking her far from her tiny Cincinnati schoolroom where she was teaching. She had gone to see Mary Donaldson, a family friend dying of what was probably uterine cancer. “My friend,” Blackwell later recalled, “died of a painful disease, the delicate nature of which made the methods of treatment a constant suffering to her.” A “lady doctor,” Donaldson told her young visitor, would have spared her the embarrassment of having male physicians examine her. Indeed, Blackwell believed, had a female physician been available, Donaldson might have sought treatment in time to save her life. For the idealistic Blackwell, moved by her friend’s plight, the idea of becoming a doctor “gradually assumed the aspect of a great moral struggle.”

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Organization of Municipal Charities and Corrections (1916)

Paper presented by L. A. Halbert, General Superintendent, Board of Public Welfare of Kansas City, Missouri
at the National Conference Of Charities And Correction Held In Indianapolis, 1916. “If we were able to ascertain the activities of all incorporated towns and cities, it would show a tremendous volume of activity and an expenditure of many millions of dollars.”

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Voluntary Health Insurance

In many respects the most direct answer of all is found in the formation of a group health cooperative or similar type of group health association. Such an organization represents the practical realization on the part of its members that they cannot safely rely either for the presence of doctors among them or for adequate health facilities upon the fortuitous illness and generosity of well­ to-do people. Instead the potential need for health care on the part of an entire group of people is pooled, together with monthly payments to cover the esti­mated cost of such care. In other words, the principle of pre­payment, which everyone agrees is the central answer to the problem of en­abling people generally to pay for ade­quate health care, is applied.

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New Concepts in Community Organization – 1961

Certain broad concepts about community organization as carried on by social workers have been developed in the social work curriculum and in practice. We have developed certain values which give us a philosophical underpinning. In addition, we have a body of rough-and ready rule-of-thumb ideas about how to carry on our daily tasks. However, if our literature is a guide, we have moved very slowly toward the development of any precise or clear body of concepts to govern either the teaching or the practice of community organization. This gap is found primarily between the philosophy, which tempers our work, and the mechanics of day-by-day action. This fact becomes apparent when we try to translate our philosophy into operational theory.

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