Cross-Professional Partnerships: Innovation in Continuing Education for Social Workers and Extension Educators

Abstract

There is a need to train professionals across disciplines to work collaboratively on program development and implementation to address the caregiving issues prevalent in our aging society. The North Carolina State University Departments of Social Work and Family and Consumer Sciences provided a training opportunity for social workers and county extension educators. The goals of the “Institute” were to provide a continuing education program that cultivated partnerships to develop and implement innovative local programming for older adults and their families. The program was also intended to increase the partnership capacity in the involved counties. This paper describes and evaluates the continuing education program and the potential of this training model for community partnership-building in the service of elders and families.

We would like to thank the Institute of Geriatric Social Work GeroRich Training Initiative for funding the project. We would also like to recognize our institute participants and guest instructors: Adrienne Calhoun, Lynne Berry, Lenora Campbell, Christine Urso, Sharon Wallace Williams, and Lou Paules.

Notes

(Scale: 1 = strongly disagree, 2 = disagree, 3 = neutral, 4 = agree, 5 = strongly agree).