Shannon R. Lane
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About Shannon
Lane's research focuses on political social work, civic engagement, and social policy. Overarching themes in Lane's writings include integration of voter engagement within human service organizations, and the need for advocacy to protect access to the right to vote. Lane serves as the Assistant Registrar of Voters in Bethany, Connecticut and is an elected member of the Bethany Board of Education. She is the co-author of Political Social Work: Using Power to Create Social Change (2018) and Social Welfare Policy in a Changing World (2024).
Contributions
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Publications
Discusses the role of political social work in competency-based social work education and provides a framework for faculty, field supervisors, and students to connect political action to their education in order to build confidence and competence related to political engagement.
Reflects personal experiences as poll workers in the 2020 and 2021 elections. Encourages social workers at all levels to understand the process and consider action as poll workers.
Discusses the social work landscape in the United States. Highlights the common pathways for social workers to the U.S. Congress and reviews the career patterns of elected social workers.
Offers an engaging, student-friendly approach that links policy and practice, while employing a critical analytic lens to U.S. social welfare policy.
Describes the implementation of a voter engagement model in social work education. Findings demonstrate the efficacy of this model in increasing social work students’ perceived importance of voting to their practice, their likelihood of voting in future elections, and their likelihood of engaging others in voting in future elections.
Describes a search of 16 databases and Google Scholar. Finds that internal characteristics of policymakers, as well as external forces in their environments, influence their behavioral health-related legislative process.
Reviews the racist history and outcomes of felon disenfranchisement and calls on the profession of social work to act on professional knowledge, ethics, and values by working to end the disenfranchisement of people with felony convictions.
Presents one component of a model for integrating voter engagement into social work education: the provision of training for field instructors on nonpartisan voter engagement at two universities over two years.
Outlines the "Power of Three" strategy, designed to engage undergraduate students in voter outreach during their BSW studies. The approach involves assigning BSW students the goal of registering a minimum of three people to vote and engaging community members in the voting process. The findings suggest that this strategy is effective in increasing students' participation in voter engagement activities and improving their understanding of the significance of voting in the context of social work practice.
Prepares social workers to influence both policy and politics with a detailed real-world framework for turning ideas into concrete goals and strategies for effecting change. Traces the roots of social work in response to systemic social inequality, it clearly relates the tenets of social work to the challenges and opportunities of modern social change.
Describes and evaluates an educational experience in the US that prepares social work practitioners and students to run for elected office; to work in leadership positions at the local, state, and federal levels; and serve as effective advocates for social change. Plans for future political engagement before and after the training were compared.