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Krause coordinates service to community
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“Part of my job is to coordinate that in a way that we all know what each other is doing so that we’re helping communities in the best way that we can.”
Community plays a large role in Denise Krause’s work. As a clinical professor in the School of Social Work, service involvement is an emphasis of clinical faculty. Moreover, she is associate dean for community engagement and alumni relations.
“Lots of faculty in the school are involved in community projects,” she relates. “Part of my job is to coordinate that in a way that we all know what each other is doing so that we’re helping communities in the best way that we can.”
The university-wide push toward service learning is reflective of campuses across the country, says Krause. The Social Work curriculum recently has shifted to a trauma-informed, human-rights perspective as it begins its reaccreditation process.
Krause’s own community involvement ranges from urban issues in her native Buffalo to rural Southern Tier counties.
She began her social work career in the late 1980s at Catholic Charities of Buffalo, where she became involved in Community Action for Pre-natal Care (CAPC), a special project of the Buffalo Pre-natal-Perinatal Network that addressed infant mortality and HIV-positive births, striving for better health outcomes for mothers and babies in the inner city.
“The Buffalo CAPC project has been the poster child for the state,” she states proudly. “The project here has done so many more things than in other places. The rate of new babies born with HIV in Buffalo is much lower than the rest of the state, and there’s been a significant mortality decrease. Even though teen pregnancy is still a social problem in Buffalo, the health outcomes are significantly improved.”
Krause attributes the success of the project here to the involvement of small grass-roots agencies and the people who populate the high-risk areas, going to the places where the women and girls can be found to talk with them.
It was during her time as a Catholic Charities social worker that Krause was introduced to the solution-focused model, an approach that has had a profound effect on sustaining results in social work.
In the field of child welfare, engagement was very much based on the social worker as expert, telling clients what they need to do differently, she explains. The solution-focused perspective places the client as the expert on his or her life. “The belief is they already know what needs to be different so if we’re encouraging and point out the things they’re already doing that are on track, that will be more helpful to clients in sustaining change than us going in with a checklist,” says Krause. “There now is strong evidence to support this approach, especially in child welfare.”
She brought the concept to Chautauqua County five years ago, acting as a consultant/trainer with the county’s social workers in regard to integrating client-centered—she calls them “client-friendly”—approaches as a way to quicker engagement and exit from clients’ lives.
“Chautauqua has really invested in changing the culture,” Krause acknowledges. “Their workers were more successful, they had real tools to work with in tough situations, and they were empowered by their supervisors.”
The buzz, she says, spread through the state, including Livingston and Allegany counties, where she has now become involved.
Krause acts as the UB trainer who has expertise in this model and connects with the child welfare workers, consulting on client visits. She notes that relationships with the counties also are being fostered at the university level. “For example, some of my colleagues have engaged in research projects in Chautauqua County and that’s very helpful to our university and school. The State Office of Child and Family Services has picked up on the usefulness of this training and they are now integrating solution-focused work in several counties,” she relates.
“What I notice about small counties is that the workers live where the clients live. Their kids go to school with the clients’ kids, they shop where the clients shop and they know the same people. Their investment is so much more obvious to me in their work with clients because when they’re improving the lives of their clients’ families, it may have a direct influence on their own families. I see the buy-in pretty quickly in rural counties with strategies that can improve the counties as a whole and the lives of the whole community.”
Krause has a deep and abiding love for Western New York. She acknowledges the strong role model her mother provided, and the sense of community that was nurtured. Through her involvement in area projects and in her multiple roles at the School of Social Work, Krause is passionate about her work.
She also plays hard. An outdoor enthusiast, she takes annual treks to Yellowstone National Park, tracking wolves. In fact, becoming a national park ambassador is part of her retirement plans. And a year ago, she obtained a motorcycle license at the age of 46. “It’s awesome. I’m very much looking forward to this season, now that I have some confidence,” Krause says with accelerated joy. “Not only did I get my license, so did my partner and another SSW faculty member. Together with a third colleague who has a bike, we’re going to start a School of Social Work motorcycle gang.”
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