By NYU Silver Communications Office, Photo: from article, New York University Silver School of Social Work, June 5, 2023
In spring 2018, as a newly minted NYU Silver MSW graduate entering New York City’s non-for-profit mental health workforce, Fatima Mabrouk was disheartened to find herself and other social workers of color overlooked for job promotions, given unequal pay, unrecognized for their achievements, and chastised for their communication style. Now, as a rising third-year NYU Silver PhD student and member of the 2023-24 cohort of NYU’s Urban Doctoral Fellowship program, she is centering her research on Black women social workers in the urban not-for-profit sector with the goal of mitigating such microaggressions in the future.
“Most social workers when they graduate from MSW programs enter into this nonprofit world,” Fatima explained. “They could be working in schools, social services agencies, hospitals, and yet data from those settings on microaggressions and discrimination towards workers is overlooked.” To fill that gap, Fatima will interview Black women social workers working in not-for-profit mental health settings in New York City about their day-to-day practice experiences. Among the questions she seeks answers to are how they cope with those microaggressions and the effect they have on their mental health and job performance; whether they have reported those microaggressions; what type of support, if any, they have received from organizational leadership; and what protective mechanisms they rely on and how they have built resilience.
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