The Boston College School of Social Work (BCSSW) received a two-year, $2.5 million grant from the Massachusetts Department of Mental Health to fund its Behavioral Health Paid Internship Program (BHPIP).
Rocío Calvo, BCSSW assistant dean for equity, justice, and inclusion and principal investigator for the BHPIP, said she cried after she discovered the program received the grant.
“I cried because being able to compensate the students for their internships makes all the difference,” Calvo said. “And I want more students like the ones that we have [in the current program] to be at BC.”
According to Calvo, students in the BCSSW must complete an internship as a degree requirement. Calvo said many of these internships are unpaid, but with the new grant, the Latinx Leadership Initiative (LLI) and Black Leadership Initiative (BLI) will be able to fund students for their work.
“So now all the students in the LLI and the BLI that do clinical work will get their internship time compensated,” Calvo said.
The BHPIP supports the LLI, where Calvo is the founding director. The LLI has been running for 10 years, and it aims to develop social workers by teaching classes in Spanish and offering field training in the Latinx community, according to its website.
The internship program will also support the BLI, which is in its third year at BC. The BLI develops social workers through coursework on the African diaspora and field training with local Black communities, according to the BLI website.
“The LLI focuses on serving Latinx communities, and the BLI focuses on serving Black communities,” Calvo said. “In many things we overlap, because you know, you can be Latino or Latinx and be Black. So, we overlap in many things, but the BLI focuses more in the Afrocentric perspective. And [the LLI] focuses more on providing culturally or linguistic congruent services to underserved Latinx families.”
Calvo said over the two-year internship program, between 150 and 200 students will receive funding for their internships.
Ximena Soto, assistant director of the LLI, said receiving compensation for their internships will allow students to better engage in their clinical work because they will not have to take on as many jobs to help them fund their degree.
“If you’re being compensated for the internship hours that you’re doing, it just allows you to not have to take on a second or third job to be in school,” Soto said. “So it just gives you a freedom to be able to concentrate on the learning and the process of change that you’re engaging in as a social worker.”
Soto said the BHPIP will help recruit more Black and Latinx students to the program, and it will also allow students to focus on their training and optimize their learning.
“To me the biggest change, one, is that in the LLI and the BLI, we’re really working hard at diversifying the body of social workers that are in this world,” Soto said. “Two, we focus a lot on their training and the support of that training that we’re trying to do. And then three, we’re trying to create a circumstance for students to be able to have the space, time, and instruction to be able to do the best learning that they can.”
Calvo expressed her gratitude for the grant and said she is excited to see the impact the BHPIP will have on social work students and the community.
“I’m very excited, I’m very thankful, and I’m lucky to do the job I do,” Calvo said. “I’m very privileged and very, very thankful for this grant. Very, very thankful for what it means, what it represents, not only for the students, but for the impact that we have in the community.”
