From campus to community
Photo: Tara Farahani’s social work placement taught her how to apply what she learned in the classroom. Photo credit: Eugen Sakhnenko.
Tara Farahani, social work ’16, has always wanted to help her community, something that attracted her to Ryerson’s social work program. But social workers can better improve people’s lives by getting to know their real experiences at the “front lines.” As a student, Farahani successfully completed her placement at Social Planning Toronto (SPT), a non-profit community organization that works to promote, as their website puts it, “equity, social justice and quality of life in Toronto,” through policy research, analysis and other community-based efforts.
While placed with SPT, Farahani helped to address a common gap between social policy and the actual people those policies are created for. “We need to ask, ‘What is a policy designed to achieve? And what is it actually achieving? How can we make it better?’ And that means acquiring data, and ensuring policies reflect that data.”
The value of a practicum in the field is “you learn that it’s not just about ‘transferring’ the knowledge you received in school to other people, but also how to put that knowledge to use, how to apply it,” says Farahani.
In her current role at St. Stephen’s Community House, Farahani is part of a team of women developing a website (external link, opens in new window) and virtual tools to directly help girls (external link, opens in new window) and young women experiencing online sexual violence.
“It’s about taking voices that are often silenced, and bringing them forward,” Farahani says. “I’m always asking myself, how can I utilize my voice, my privilege, to help make those other voices heard?”