McDaniel College Social Work Professor Receives Service-Learning Award

Jim Kunz, social work professor at McDaniel College, received the Alan G. Penczek Service-Learning Faculty Award from the Maryland-D.C. Campus Compact. He resides in Westminster, Md.

The award recognizes one faculty member from 34 regional independent colleges in the Maryland and Washington, D.C., area for excellence in the integration of service-learning into the curriculum and impact to students and community.

Kunz has used service-learning in five courses at McDaniel, including “The Meaning of Homelessness” course taught during the college’s 2014 January Term in which students assisted at local homeless shelters and helped to conduct a yearly count of the homeless in Carroll County, Md. [As an aside, five of the 10 McDaniel students in the course had faced homelessness themselves during their youth.]

Students in his “Marginalized Cultures and Macro Response” course engage in service-learning in non-profit social welfare organizations, as a way to learn how these organizations are structured. He also developed a service-learning course involving an equine therapy institute at McDaniel’s branch campus in Budapest, Hungary, and organized students from both McDaniel’s main campus and McDaniel Europe in building 10 Habitat for Humanity homes in Beius, Romania.

Named the 2011 Maryland Social Work Educator of the Year, Kunz is a member of the Maryland Circle of Caring Homelessness Board and annually organizes McDaniel’s Walk a Mile in Her Shoes team to raise funds for Rape Crisis Intervention Service of Carroll County. Most recently, he has been involved with his students in building five Habitat for Humanity townhomes adjacent to McDaniel’s campus.

Additionally, his supervision and analysis of quantitative and qualitative study of the homeless teens and young adults in Baltimore City with four students resulted in a report published by Health Care for the Homeless.

On the faculty at McDaniel since 2008, Kunz teaches policy, macro practice and research and mentors students in his practice and research interest areas of social work advocacy, community organizing cost analyses of social welfare programs and services to ex-offenders. He previously taught at Columbia University, University of Chicago, University of Maryland and Millersville University. He earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Virginia, a master’s degree in social work from the University of Maryland and both a master’s degree in economics and Ph.D. in economics and social work from the University of Michigan.

For more information about McDaniel College, visit http://www.mcdaniel.edu.