Abstract
If the life and works of Ann Weick could be put to music, the genre would be a border corridor. In Latin America, the corrido is a type of ballad that often extols the virtues, struggles, and accomplishments of a hero or heroine; border ballad tells the tales of bandits whose exploits are fuelled by the frustrations of class struggle and domination. These bandits through heroic deeds strike out against authority. As marginalized people sing them, they become tales of resistance, empowerment, and hope (Kanellos, 2008).
Ann’s life embodies the corrido: She was a heroine who fought for justice. Her life was a model of how to create change. She bravely spoke truth to power, and her passing evokes a great lament.
Ann was raised in Portland, Oregon, and was the daughter of a father who was a sign maker and a mother who was a homemaker. Her call to social work emerged from Catholic religious tradition. She graduated as high school valedictorian from an all girls’ Catholic school and later served on the board of directors of the National Catholic Reporter for many years. She was loyal to her Catholic spiritual traditions and yet critiqued the papal policies and politics. Her life was one of service and included Peace Corp work with Turkish children in orphanages and schools. While Ann was well known for her systemic thinking and contributions to theory development, her social work experience emphasized direct work with poor families in a variety of capacities.
These aspects of Ann, her spiritual tradition, her international work, and exposure to U.S. poverty were the foundation for the contributions that earned her many awards including the Council on Social Work Education Lifetime Achievement Award. Ann Weick was known, with her husband Dennis Saleebey, for the development and promotion of the strengths perspective. However, when Ann Weick’s body of work is reviewed as a whole, the underlying theme is that the amelioration of troubles must include as a fundamental component the respect for and value of client systems. Ann’s writings indicate that her corridor struggle was with an oppressive system that continued to violate people who were marginalized based on race, class, gender, and sexual orientation. The cautionary tale that the corrido of Ann Weick would tell is that becoming completely aligned with the medical model coupled with the devaluing of practice wisdom strips social work theory, intervention, and research design from its humane element.
Ann Weick’s body of work tells us about how she thought but does not tell us how she lived. The sheer number of organizations that she founded or was involved in is staggering and reads like a handbook on community organizing for increasing access. Some of these organizations like Just Food, which she founded in 2009, addressed a traditional social work issue, food sustainability. She also has been involved in organizations that promote outside of the box interventions like Van Go Mobile Arts whose medium of art is used to engage youth in developing employment skills. Her influence saturated the campus at the University of Kansas (KU), where she became acting dean in 1987 and had an exceptional career as dean that ended with her retirement in 2006. Her passion for justice did not end with the interest of the KU School of Social Welfare, but rather extended to all aspects of campus life. She was primarily responsible for using inter-dialogue groups to engage students across campus (primarily undergraduate students) in quarterly discussion about areas of difference that included gender and sexual orientation, race, and economic diversity. It was in these groups that young undergraduate male students learned for the first time that women, as a normal course of their day, take precautions to guard against sexual assault. It also is where for the first time undergraduate students, many from small towns, learned about the experience of transgender men and women.
In addition to being an accomplished scholar whose writings addressed the contributions of social work as a holistic lens to understand social problems, empowerment of women and communities, adult development, critiques of the move toward a medical model in social work, and postmodernism (to name just a few) and a leading social work administrator, she was a formidable community activist. Her community activism including being chair or a member of task forces on racism, creating discrimination free communities, nondiscrimination for queer people in housing, food equity, and HIV services. Her involvement on these tasks force led in the mid-1990s to a city ordinance for Lawrence, Kansas, that provided protection of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transsexual populations from discrimination for housing, employment, and public accommodation.
Finally, Ann Weick was a leading feminist scholar for which Affilia is honored to call its own. She was involved with and promoted feminist scholarship through her many years of work with Affilia where she served as a consulting editor and on the editorial board from 1992 to 1999. While we mourn the loss of Ann, we recognize that her legacy of scholarship, impact on social work education, influence in the practice of social work, and in the advancement of equity for all people is far-reaching and everlasting.
If this were a true corridor, it would have a message that would be repeated throughout the song, like a refrain. Her refrain might be: Justice is at our fingertips if we live our lives with hope and love.