School of Social Work students and faculty collaborated with New York's Emma L. Bowen Community Service Center to raise community voices and share stories of mental health and substance use recovery.
An outdoor jungle gym. The vibrant colors of a wall mural. Water spraying from a fire hydrant. A concert in the park.
These vivid images, each with accompanying poetry and captions, are among 30 photographs in the exhibit Café Photovoice: The Sequel, which reveal powerful stories of healing by nine men and women in mental health and substance use recovery at the Emma L. Bowen Community Service Center in Upper Manhattan. The exhibit also offered a collaborative opportunity for Adelphi’s School of Social Work students and faculty to immerse themselves in a community-based evaluation study that focused on participants’ voices.
Bilingual and Interdisciplinary Partnership
Chrisann Newransky, PhD, associate professor and director of the IDEATE Interdisciplinary Education and Training Experience in the School of Social Work, said the images and caption writing documented how the participants’ environment impacted their recovery in a powerful and bilingual approach to using art for social change.
“One aspect of the project that beautifully highlighted our Adelphi student population is that a social work graduate and a fine arts student worked on our research team to ensure that the project could be fully bilingual in English and Spanish, and culturally appropriate. This is important because 60 percent of the clients at Emma Bowen speak Spanish and have a Latinx background,” Dr. Newransky said.
Combining Therapy With a Creative Outlet
Ana Rodgers, director of the Bowen Center, said her integrated behavioral health program incorporates evidence-based practices to provide both therapeutic intervention and a creative outlet in a community that is made up predominantly of people of color. Photovoice Worldwide—a nonprofit that promotes ethical photography for social change, using photographs to help document participants’ lives—provided training and support for this intervention.
In describing the participants’ experience, Rodgers said: “They’re actually going out into their community and taking pictures while doing a lot of reflective thinking and self-awareness about what it’s like to be them in their world. And that creativity piece is really essential, because it helps to elevate the therapeutic intervention to a real-life experience.”
Social Work Students Use Photography for Social Change
This is the second Bowen Center Café Photovoice exhibit that included Adelphi social work students. The first time Dr. Newransky and Philip Rozario, PhD, professor of social work, helped implement the project was during the COVID-19 pandemic, in a virtual format. This time, they enlisted research assistant and Master of Social Work graduate Rhaida Maldonado, MSW ’24, who co-facilitated in-person group sessions with Michael Blecher, a student in Adelphi’s PhD in Social Work program. Dr. Newransky said these social work students provided participants with cameras and talked about safety and the ethics of consent in photography, as well as techniques like lighting. The participants went out into their neighborhoods to take photos armed with a research question, which was then the focus of their next group discussion and caption writing. The social work team interviewed the participants about these experiences, which are now, along with the photos and captions, part of the data for the project in which the participants explained their photos and other aspects of their recovery.
Dr. Newransky reached beyond the School of Social Work to get help from Rebeca Romero, a bilingual Adelphi senior majoring in graphic design and business management. Romero laid out the photos, poems and captions in 18 x 12-inch pieces for the gallery and created the design images for the exhibit’s program, signage and factsheets, all in both English and Spanish.
Maldonado, who is also bilingual, said the project utilized skills she had recently learned in a social work class. “It was interesting to see how the clients integrated the artwork,” she said. “Sometimes clients don’t know how to put things into words or how to express what they want to say. But a picture gives them the opportunity to express based on perspective.”
School of Social Work Working in the Community
The participants—many of whom not only wanted to use their names but also speak openly about their work—asked to have a formal in-person exhibit of their photos for their community. This took place on December 19, 2024, and was covered in a segment on CBS News. Newransky and team will share their experience with other community organizations at the Bronx Wellness Center in March, and hope to bring the exhibit to Adelphi in April or May.
Rodgers said working with Adelphi has been an exciting growth experience for the center and clients. “Individuals who are walking through our doors don’t often have contact with higher education or opportunities to learn from a professor or a graduate student,” she said. “So it creates this beautiful intersection of those worlds and helps people see that opportunity is all around—and that collaboration is necessary and important for recovery in healing communities.”
Maldonado said that helping to lead this program as a recent social work graduate was an equally positive experience for her. “It provided valuable insight into how we can leverage our educational backgrounds to serve those who might not have a voice. It emphasized the importance of using the skills, knowledge and opportunities gained through our degrees to create a meaningful and positive impact within our communities.”