When power fails for days, a family’s needs become immediate and concrete. Food must be kept safe. People need drinking water, a tolerable indoor temperature, transportation, and a way to communicate. Distress is part of that experience, but so are the material conditions producing it.
Gary’s prolonged August power outage raises a question for social work education: How did the region’s programs put their expertise and institutional resources to work for residents?
Following the August 11 storm, some homes and businesses were still without electricity thirteen days later. Associated Press reporting also included Erin Carreon, a Gary resident pursuing a doctorate in social work at the University of Chicago, discussing the city’s history of disinvestment. Her presence in that reporting is a reminder that members of the profession were themselves experiencing the emergency. It does not establish what any university organized.
The question is local and institutional
Indiana University offers both bachelor’s and master’s social work education at IU Northwest in Gary. Its program describes learning through community organizations, government agencies, and health care facilities. Valparaiso University also offers social work education in the region. These institutions are reasonable places to begin asking how community engagement operated during an actual community emergency.
The public sources reviewed for this article did not establish a specific organized outage response by either social work program. That is a limit of this review, not evidence that faculty, students, or schools did nothing. This article also does not establish that either program offered counseling as its principal response. No institutional interviews were conducted.
The question should therefore remain open and answerable. Were social work programs helping residents obtain water, refrigeration, air conditioning, transportation, and replacement food? Were they assisting local organizations with outreach and logistics? If therapeutic counseling was offered, how was it connected to practical assistance?
Schools should have the opportunity to document what they did, what they could not do, and what they learned. A public account would be more useful than either an unsupported accusation of absence or a general statement about commitment to service.
Counseling must connect with the conditions of distress
Counseling can be valuable during a disaster. People may experience grief, fear, exhaustion, and the loss of a familiar sense of security. The concern is whether social work reduces a public emergency to an individual’s emotional response.
A conversation about coping cannot keep a refrigerator running. A referral that assumes a working phone, available transportation, and an open agency may fail precisely when it is most needed. Effective practice must connect emotional support with the resources that allow a person to remain safe.
The distinction is visible in local reporting. WFYI described neighbors delivering ice for medication storage, an oxygen filling station, and families confronting the costs of temporary accommodation and generator fuel. These were practical efforts to sustain people through the outage. They show the kinds of activities around which social work assistance could be organized.
The profession’s ethical framework supports an expansive response. Section 6.03 of the NASW Code of Ethics calls on social workers to provide appropriate professional services during public emergencies to the extent possible. Its broader social welfare provisions also address living conditions and access to basic needs. Those responsibilities invite practical engagement with the environment in which people are struggling.
What schools should be prepared to do
A social work program does not need to become an electrical utility to make a meaningful contribution. It can establish agreements with neighborhood organizations before an emergency. It can prepare supervised outreach teams, identify accessible referral pathways, and help coordinate requests for supplies and transportation.
During an outage, faculty and appropriately supervised students could assist residents with relief applications, help locate functioning services, and identify gaps that citywide announcements miss. Partnerships with nursing, medicine, public health, and emergency management could connect social needs with qualified clinical and operational support.
This work must be organized safely. Students should not be sent into hazardous areas or assigned responsibilities beyond their training. Faculty and students may also have damaged homes, dependents, and urgent needs of their own. A credible institutional plan anticipates those limitations instead of treating volunteer endurance as an unlimited resource.
Schools should also help residents examine the systems that shaped the emergency. That could include documenting inaccessible relief processes, supporting resident participation in utility proceedings, and evaluating whether assistance reached people who could not travel.
The measure of community engagement should include what residents actually received. How many requests were resolved? Which neighborhoods remained difficult to reach? What did community partners say would have helped sooner?
Gary offers social work education a test of its own commitments. Schools that teach the relationship between people and their environments should be prepared to respond when those environments become unsafe. The profession should be able to show how its knowledge helped people obtain the conditions necessary to live, as well as the support necessary to endure.