As a young social worker for the United States Department of Defense (DoD), Fordham GSS Professor Mary Ann Forgey, Ph.D., felt a little overwhelmed.
Forgey had desired to travel and work abroad for some time. She knew the military had branches worldwide that employed civilian social workers.
“I also wanted to do something that would give me a tremendous amount of experience,” she said.
She dedicated herself to finding a spot. But back then, it wasn’t as simple as going on Linkedin or usa.gov and submitting your resume. Applications were sent through the mail, and it could take several years to even be considered—especially for applicants applying to the federal civil service system for the first time. Forgey decided to do what she could to make herself known within this system.
“I went over to Germany and stayed with German relatives who I had met once before,” she said.
During her stay, Forgey said she “Visited [US military] installations in Germany, just to give them my resume and tell them that I was interested in the job.”
Although unusual, it worked. Soon after returning from her trip to Germany, Forgey was selected through the federal civil service system and accepted a job offer from the DoD as a social work manager in the family advocacy program in Wiesbaden, Germany. What she didn’t know, however, was that the job also came with a larger scope than she expected.
Her role dealt not only with child abuse cases but also with the military’s mandatory spouse abuse reporting system. While Forgey had worked with many cases involving child abuse and neglect previously as a senior social worker in the Protective Services Unit of the Massachusetts Department of Social Services, navigating spousal abuse was foreign to her, and somewhat intimidating.
But she was proactive. Forgey spent long hours in the library becoming familiar with this unfamiliar dynamic and using every training resource the military made available to her to learn. The work paid off; through her after-hours studying and intensive on-the-job training, Forgey developed a stronger sense of competency in working with this population. This also gave rise to a deep curiosity about the most effective intervention approaches. So much so that it became her area of research interest when pursuing her doctorate years later.
“I wanted to do research on identifying the patterns of violence and the kinds of intervention that would be responsive,” she said.
After receiving her doctorate from Columbia, she came to Fordham and continued researching intimate partner violence (IPV) alongside her other professorial duties. She also brought to Fordham a profound respect and appreciation for the military population and the role of social work within the military. She remained tied to the military community in various ways, and most recently in 2019 broadened this work to an international level when she founded and became the coordinator of the International Military Social Work Consortium.
Now, after three decades in the classroom and tireless dedication to these communities, she has announced her retirement.
A Full Cultural Immersion
Forgey said her time in Germany was immersive—not just in the culture abroad but also in military culture. As a civilian working alongside active duty members, Forgey was the minority on the military installation where she worked and lived. At times, this could be difficult—for example, trying to become familiar with military terminology and the military ranking system (Forgey used a chart on her desk to help). Looking back, she recognizes the challenges of deep immersion as a positive.
By experiencing the differentness of being a civilian within a military environment on a daily basis, “you become much more sensitive to the military culture that you’re in,” Forgey said.
She advises Master of Social Work (M.S.W.) students interested in military social work to be proactive by volunteering or completing their field placement at a government organization, like the Office of Veterans Affairs (VA).
“Put yourself into those experiences,” she said. “You won’t learn about military culture by going to a couple of workshops.”
Forgey said the eight years she spent working in direct practice before pursuing her doctoral degree were crucial to informing how she’s taught students for 30 years. In addition, throughout her career at Fordham, she did her best to stay connected to the field in various ways, such as serving as a field advisor and providing training to agencies. Experience in the field gave her insight into the profession that you can’t learn from textbook theories alone. She said it helps her connect with students over classroom content and what they’re seeing in their field placements.
“It’s helped with career guidance for the students,” she said. “As well as connecting what they’re learning in the field, to what they’re learning in the classroom.”
Professional Rewards and More International Pursuit
Forgey said the most rewarding thing about teaching is the opportunities it has afforded her inside and outside the classroom.
Within the classroom, Forgey reminisced on her experience creating coursework and adding to the Fordham GSS curriculum. She reveled in the creative process of course formulation—from the topics discussed to the readings and assignments given.
Early in her career at Fordham, she had the opportunity over two summers (1996, 1997) to teach about social work curriculum development when she traveled to Vietnam with a Fordham team. They trained Vietnamese faculty interested in developing a social work degree program at Ho Chi Minh Open University.
From 1999-2005, Forgey served as Co-Director of the Interdisciplinary Center for Family and Child Advocacy, a joint program between GSS and Fordham’s Law School. In this role, she developed and taught a joint law and social work elective and a field seminar with the Law School on domestic violence, and created a range of joint law and social work field placements. Her love of curriculum development also inspired her to spearhead GSS’s initial foray into online education.
At Fordham, one course she particularly enjoyed bringing to life concerned a topic close to her heart—military social work. Forgey created Fordham GSS’s first-ever military social work elective in 2011.
“When I was able to pursue my interests and develop the military social work course, that was a wonderful thing,” she said.
Forgey also contributed impactful work outside the curriculum through grant-funded research. Two that stand out, she said, were receiving funding to identify patterns of intimate partner violence (IPV) at Fort Hood in Texas, and evaluating the use of standardized clients in IPV training at Fort Bragg in North Carolina. As part of the second study, standardized clients—individuals who have been trained to take on the role of a client in a particular case situation of intimate partner violence—were used for demonstration and practice purposes. Forgey shared the results of this research at multiple national conferences, agency trainings, and through her publications. After the second grant’s work finished, she relayed what she learned to Fordham’s M.S.W. students and shared some of the actual products from her research in the classroom.
“Here was an idea that I was able to pursue, and then I could use it in the classroom,” she said. “We videotaped, all of the standardized client interviews…and I showed them in class.”
In addition, Forgey’s international work continued to flourish. In 2005, she received a Fulbright Scholar Award to Ireland. Along with her teaching duties at University College Dublin, Forgey partnered with Irish Social Work Professor, Mary Allen. to conduct research on intimate partner violence assessment practices within Ireland’s child welfare system.
Since her Fulbright, Forgey’s research has focused on understanding military social work practice in other countries. This led to her most recent triumph, publishing her co-edited book Military Social Work Around the Globe, the first book published about military social work from an international perspective. The book contains chapters written by experts from 11 of the 29 countries identified to date that employ social workers within their national defense departments, including Australia, Canada, Denmark, Finland, Ireland, Israel, the Netherlands, New Zealand, South Africa, the UK, and the USA. In addition, there are also contributions from two countries interested in the utilization of social workers in this capacity (Japan and Ukraine), as well as one that has already taken steps to do so (Slovakia).
The book explains and analyzes each country’s perspective and individual approach toward military social work.
“I think one of the successful strategies employed by certain countries involves military social workers working not only with the individual, but with the unit as a whole. When social workers practice in this way, they see both the individual service member and the unit as their client. In these countries, the social workers are actually embedded in those units,” Forgey said in a previous interview. “This type of embedded practice is so critical because it helps to address one of the major issues with providing effective support, and that is the stigma associated with help-seeking, particularly within the military population.”
Another Immersion—This Time, Close to Home
Forgey’s career has been a constant adaptation of her skillset into different contexts—both culturally and geographically. At GSS, she trades time between the Westchester and Lincoln Center campuses. Over the course of her career she also spent a significant amount of time at the Rose Hill campus, having served multiple terms on the Faculty Senate and its executive committee, and from 2014-2015 served as President of the Senate. She’s lived in Germany, and Ireland, and has spent plenty of time with military members—from the US and elsewhere. However, there’s one community she feels like she would like to be more deeply connected to, her home in Kingston, New York. She hopes to do that in retirement.
As a result of her academic career and long commute, she explains, “I’ve, in a way, been on the periphery,” she said. “My goal is to immerse myself in my community right now.”
Does this mean her professional ambitions will fall by the wayside? Not so fast. Forgey said she is also committed to supporting the development of the field of occupational social work, where social workers focus on workers’ well-being and the stressors faced within a wide range of workplaces. She said this is an area where the US has fallen behind compared to other countries. Occupational social work has also remained a recognized practice field in many other countries. For example, social workers who work with military service members in the Netherlands identify themselves as “occupational social workers” and work out of the Dutch Occupational Social Work Services Center.
“Occupational social work is the specialized field most suited to address the needs of workers under stress, yet it has been in decline in the United States since the 1990s,” reads the abstract of Forgey’s recent 2023 article, “Occupational Social Work: A Field of Practice in Need of Revival,” which appeared in Families in Society: The Journal of Contemporary Research.
Forgey is balancing her penchant for work with community activities at home, particularly volunteering. She currently volunteers for the Ulster County Italian American Foundation, helping with their cultural events and community service efforts. She believes that this type of community immersion will help to pave the way for whatever professional pursuits await her in the future.
“The direction I want to go in, professionally, will become clearer,” she said. “But right now, my burning desire is to just be a part of this community.”
