Southern Miss Social Work Students Bring Awareness to Hattiesburg Campus

The School of Social Work at The University of Southern Mississippi recently teamed up with Kids Hub, a child advocacy center, to create a pinwheel garden on the Hattiesburg campus to raise awareness about services the agency provided during 2016.

Kids Hub serves local children by conducting much of the forensic interviewing for major abuse and neglect cases. Their interviewers are trained specifically to interview children in these difficult situations, and then the stories and reports are used in courts of law. The pinwheel gardens were placed in front of business and agencies around the Hattiesburg area, including Southern Miss, and the counties in which they serve.

The garden is located near the entrance to Fritzsche-Gibbs Hall. The small pinwheels symbolized the 366 children served by Kids Hub last year, and the two larger pinwheels symbolized the two child deaths investigated by the agency. Social work students raised and paid for the pinwheel garden through their on-campus student clubs, Bachelor of Social Work Club, Student Association of Social Work and Phi Alpha Honors Society.

“We work with this population every day,” says Rachel Lahasky, clinical instructor in the School of Social Work. “Educating the community and working towards prevention is our goal in advocating for these children.”

For more information on the School of Social Work in The University of Southern Mississippi's College of Health, visit www.usm.edu/social-work.