CFWB Fellowship
About The Fellowship
The CFWB Junior Fellowship is designed to explore the integration of practice, research, and policy as a way of deepening students’ capacity to work effectively with children and families across the life cycle. The CFWB integrative seminar meets five times during the academic year. Each of the integrative seminars is two hours and is held online on Saturdays. The integrative seminar is an activity offered by the CFWB and not a course offered for credit as part of the MSS curriculum.
CWEL students are required to participate in the CFWB Junior Fellowship. Students who complete two years as a Junior Fellow will have this milestone noted on their academic transcript. Advanced Standing students who participate for one year must complete a special integrative paper. Click here to complete the Junior Fellow application.
2026-2027 Fellowship Topic
The topic this year will focus on Spirituality and Social Work, exploring spirituality as a vital dimension of child and family wellbeing. Across diverse cultural, religious, and secular contexts, children, caregivers, and families draw on spiritual and meaning making frameworks to understand identity, navigate relationships, cope with adversity, and cultivate resilience and hope. Attending to spirituality allows social workers to engage more fully with how families make sense of experience across the life course and within the contexts of community, culture, and history.
Within social work practice, spirituality can be understood both as a dimension of human diversity and as an essential component of the biopsychosocial spiritual framework used to assess wellbeing and guide intervention. Ethical and culturally responsive practice requires social workers to recognize when spiritual beliefs, practices, and communities are central sources of meaning, strength, and support for children and families—and when they may also be sources of tension, struggle, or conflict. This Fellowship emphasizes spiritually sensitive assessment and engagement as part of providing comprehensive, person and family centered care.
Grounded in social work’s historical roots and contemporary ethical mandates, the Fellowship will examine the evolving relationship between social work, religion, and spirituality. Fellows will explore how spiritual and religious traditions have contributed to caregiving, mutual aid, community cohesion, and social justice efforts; while also engaging thoughtfully with the ways spiritual systems can reflect broader social inequities or create challenges for individuals and families. Rather than approaching spirituality as inherently harmful or inherently protective, the Fellowship emphasizes nuanced, contextual understanding and critical reflection.
Using an integrative lens that spans micro, mezzo, and macro practice, the Fellowship will consider questions such as
- How do children and families draw on spiritual or existential resources in contexts of trauma, illness, migration, discrimination, and loss?
- How can social workers ethically and skillfully assess and respond to spiritual dimensions of family life as part of biopsychosocial spiritual practice?
- What roles do faith-based organizations, spiritual communities, and religious institutions play in supporting—or sometimes complicating—child and family wellbeing?
- How do spirituality and meaning intersect with race, culture, gender, sexuality, disability, and other social locations across the life course?
Faculty led seminars will integrate theory, research, case examples, and practice wisdom, with opportunities for reflection and dialogue grounded in students’ field experiences. Consistent with the mission of the Center for Child and Family Wellbeing, the Fellowship emphasizes strengths based, relational, and justice-oriented approaches to supporting children and families across diverse contexts.
By engaging spirituality as a dimension of diversity, assessment, and relational life, Fellows will deepen their capacity to provide ethically grounded, culturally responsive care and to integrate reflective practice into their professional work with children, families, and communities.
Dates for AY 26/27
5 Saturdays, 3 p.m. – 5 p.m., online
- September 19, 2026
- October 24, 2026
- December 5, 2026
- February 20, 2027
- March 20, 2027
- April 11, 2027 (Makeup class if needed)
Past Fellowship Topics
2025-2026: Intersection of Trauma-Informed Social Work and the Law
2024-2025: Migration and the Family
2023-2024: Children and Family Wellbeing: Critical Perspectives on Risk and Resilience
2022-2023: The Impact of War and Political Violence on Children and Families with Special Focus on Factors Associated with Risk and Resilience.
2021-2022: An Exploration of Child/Adolescent Trauma Across Service Systems (e.g. Education, Mental Health, Health, Parental Health and Mental Health)
2020-2021: The Intersection of Child and Family Wellbeing, COVID-19 and Social/Health Disparities Associated with Structural Inequity and Racism
2019-2020: The Intersection of Trauma, Education, and Juvenile Justice
2018-2019: Trauma Informed Social Work and Child Wellbeing: Global Perspectives
2017-2018: ACES (Adverse Childhood Experiences Studies)
2016-2017: Trauma Informed Practice with children, adolescents, and families
2015-2016: Juvenile Justice
Child and Family Wellbeing
300 Airdale Rd
Bryn Mawr
Pennsylvania, 19010
610-520-2600
childandfamily@brynmawr.edu