Mission: to Build a Better Future

This semester I had the great opportunity to work at Mary’s Center as a Social Services Intern within the Social Services Department. Mary’s Center is a Federally Qualified Health Center with various locations in the DC metropolitan region. This community center provides comprehensive health, dental, social and education services to individuals whose needs too often go unmet by the public and private systems. Mary’s Center mission is to build better futures through a holistic, multipronged approach to help each participant access individualized services that set them on the path toward good health, stable families, and economic independence.

Interning at Mary’s Center gave me a good career foundation, shaped my interests, helped me integrate my academic coursework with a real-time work experience, and enabled me to build and hone skills I will need to succeed in the workplace.

As a social services intern, my duties consist of participating in team meetings and trainings to share experiences and insight to utilize any information learned in daily work practices to better help meet the needs of every family or individual, collaborating with program manager to identify community needs and address those needs through team meetings and events, assisting in the growth of the agency through problem-solving and support, following personnel practices, showing respect and sensitivity for cultural differences.

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Other responsibilities included, grant management for the Domestic Violence Advocacy program to provide comprehensive support for all survivors in order to empower individuals and strengthen families, translating and updating prenatal care community resources issued by local agencies for our prenatal patients to keep them up to date, and shadowing Social Services family support workers to learn how to connect patients to resources.

Additionally, I was given the opportunity to redesign the Family Support Worker training manual where I developed detailed instructions on the work flows, such as how to access the language hotline. Also, I created flowcharts of the social services programs across Mary’s Center to make it easy-to-understand, which included an organizational chart, and all incorporated into the FSW Training Manual so that every family support worker has the tools to address the social and emotional needs of participants and their families.

Mary’s Center provides the access to health care services regardless of participants’ ability to pay, addressing the care needs of many individuals and families who are under-resourced, poorly served, and uninsured. This service is important because health inequities and disparities negatively affect groups of people who have systematically experienced greater social or economic obstacles to health. With that said, Mary’s Center uses a social change model that addresses the various factors that lead to poor health such as poverty, health behaviors, and limited education. With the various partnerships throughout the community that offer services, Mary’s Center is able to link and integrate these services to empower vulnerable families to lead healthy and productive lives.

Additionally, Mary’s Center offers early, quality prenatal care services to women, regardless of their immigration status or ability to pay which is a family-related service One of these services is called CenteringPregnancy, a group model that addresses the lack of access to comprehensive quality prenatal education for underserved mothers and according to researchers, has been documented to be very successful in improving birth outcomes (Gennaro, Melnyk, O’Conner, Gibeau, & Nadel, 2017). This ten-week program consists of grouping participants by their expected due date to help build community and normalize pregnancy experience to develop a long-term support network. Similarly, Bernstein & Garretto (2014) analyzed data that support the benefits of group model of care, such as CenteringPregnancy that includes: improved compliance with prenatal care, higher rates of breastfeeding, and greater patient satisfaction and readiness for childbirth and parenting (Bernstein & Garretto, 2014).

This experience allowed me to develop skills that I think are needed in the real work setting, such as being reliable, professionalism, and being able to work in a stressful environment. Additionally, I was able to learn more about myself and my capabilities and how well I can carry myself and sell myself to future employers. As I have stated before, in my discussions my plan after graduation includes taking a gap year to work for governmental agencies (local or state) while also studying for the MCAT/GRE after graduation. After one or two years, I plan to return back to school to get my master’s in public health. After earning my masters, I plan on attending medical school to become an Emergency Physician. However, If I am able to advance in my employment within the first couple of years, such as getting a promotion and earning more through job certification training or by going back to school, then I plan on staying within the agency and work my way up the ladder to a high-level position. Although my initial plan isn't to work with families directly to provide social services, having this family science background has allowed me to gain essentials skills and the adequate training to work for a wide range of careers.