Social Work's Toba Kerson and Judith McCoyd Ph.D. '03 quoted in New York Times article

Professor Emeritus of Social Work Toba Kerson and Judith McCoyd, Ph.D. '03, have both been cited in a New York Times article on The Neediest Cases Fund. The article covers the fund's 105th campaign and the New Yorkers it brings assistance to.

Both Kerson and McCoyd urged readers to empathize with those affected by financial hardship, and look carefully at the systematic causes and effects of extreme poverty.

From the article:

"We do the whole cowboy thing of, get on your horse, take your gun, shoot the problem and then you move on and everything’s fine,” said Kerson. “And that’s not what most of these problems are: They’re chronic. We blame people for things they absolutely cannot help, that are circumstantial as opposed to something that came from within them.”

Kerson is the Mary Hale Chase Professor Emeritus of Social Sciences and a Fulbright Specialist; McCoyd, who graduated from Bryn Mawr's Graduate School of Social Work and Social Research in 2003, is an associate professor at Rutgers University's School of Social Work and focuses her research on perinatal health care and medical decision making. The two were previously guests on a University of Buffalo School of Social Work podcast on social workers in the healthcare field.