My name is Greer Hamilton and I work for the Mobile Safety-Net Team, which is a basic human
needs initiative of the John R. Oishei foundation.
I started seeing a social worker in high school after my parents’ separation, and so it
gave me a really positive experience with social work.
And when talking with my social worker she thought it would be a really good job for
me because it combined my interest in mental health as well as working with community members.
So, I changed my career path the summer before I went to college.
The only context I had for a social worker was a school social worker, so I didn’t
fully have an idea of what like community work would look like for a social work.
So, I started volunteering as often as I could in college so that I could get more experience
with Buffalo and different people living here, and then I realized that I could also be interested
in advocacy work and policy work in social work, which now kind of brought me to the
work I’m doing both at the NASW and at my job doing coalition building.
I try to help people do community based change to alleviate poverty.
So that means that I schedule meetings with different organizations and individuals to
learn more about what they’re interested in working on, I plan events, I promote different
organizations and their missions, I also try to develop action plans that will exist beyond
my time at my job.
So, I start work typically at 7:30.
By 8:00 usually my other coworkers are in, so we are a team of three, so my coworkers
Annie and Natalie are generally in the office by then.
We usually catch up about what each other did the evening before or meeting that we’re
all going to together that day.
And then depending on the day I’m either in the office all day or I’m at meetings.
So, typically if it’s a meeting day I have one or more meetings that are about an hour
or an hour and a half.
I have two coalitions that I facilitate, one in Newfane and one in North Tonawanda.
So typically, I spend a bulk of my day in either of those communities working with the
residents and organizations on the coalition itself or related projects.
Our initiative uses a framework called collective impact.
And so, for our coalitions myself and my coworkers act as facilitators which means that we schedule
meetings, we develop agendas, and we work with the coalition members to develop action
oriented items to work on.
We are going to be doing the North Tonawanda coalition this week and talking about the
summer kick-off event.
North Tonawanda, because of regional transportation issues, has expressed interest in providing
residents that are near or below the poverty level with ability to access services on a
regular and consistent basis.
So, how we do that is by running a project that we called the HUB.
And we provide residents with at least 30 organizations where they can learn about the
services they offer or enroll in that service.
So, it’s an evening event, so we’ll be asking people to volunteer to help with intake
forms, to help set up tables.
Really just kind of planning out what it is we need to do to make the event run effectively.
I think I am making somewhat of a difference in the work I’m doing.
I think I’m not able to see the difference I’m making because alleviating poverty is
a long-term thing.
So sometimes that is a little disheartening, because you want to see the immediacy of your
work in front of you but I do think that that’s one reason a) I continue to do this job but
also b) it’s kind of shaping the next iteration of my social work career because it’s showing
me that we have to have conversations about equity in our work.
For me, whatever work I do after this job has to include economic and racial equity
because I think poverty is systemic and so in order to actually effectively alleviate
poverty I have to be able to work on issues of equity.
So, I do think I’m making a difference, just not always how I think the difference
should be made.