NEW YORK-BOSTON EXCHANGE OF SETTLEMENT EXPERIENCES
The inter-city settlement conference held the past month in Boston, though not the first of such conferences, was unique in that it brought together settlement residents so widely separated as the New York Association of Neighborhood Workers and the Boston Social Union.
The first meeting dealt with the problem of securing and training workers. Eva W. White, headworker of the Elizabeth Peabody House and lecturer in the Boston School for Social Workers, spoke of the need of such training as schools of philanthropy and settlements themselves can give. Richard H. Edwards of the Inter-Collegiate Young Men’s Christian Association explained the movement for community service by college men. Settlement Scholarships and School and College Chapters for Settlement Work was the subject of a paper by Geraldine Gordon of Denison House.
John L. Elliott of New York contributed the suggestion that young college men and women contemplating social work as a profession might do a half year’s field work in the settlement at the end of the sophomore and senior years in lieu of academic courses.
Mrs. Max Morgenthau of the Henry Street Settlement told how that settlement trained its volunteer workers in clerical work, in regularity in attendance and in actual personal acquaintance with their tenement community. This training has created in that settlement a group of volunteers, who are becoming experts in their work and one of whom has developed a series of pageant plays. The mistress of the wardrobe in these pageants is an authority on costume, and has studied the technical processes of dyeing fabrics in order to obtain the best possible results.
The subject of an evening meeting was Standards and Stipends for Work and Workers, and was under the leadership of Lilian D. Wald, president of the National Federation of Settlements. Miss Wald held that there should be flexibility in methods of work and a true equality between the administrative officers of the settlement and the specialists who give so much distinction to its work. She spoke of a university teacher who came back to the settlement to “recapture the freedom of her method.” M. deG. Trenholm, to whom very much of the success of the conference was due, urged strongly the necessity of proper compensation for settlement service, if standards are to be maintained.
The Sunday afternoon meeting was devoted to the subject of federation in relation to standards of work. Henry Moskowitz of Madison House asked that the settlements keep in mind their primary duty of furnishing opportunity for the manifestation of local social spirit. He showed that in an increasing number of neighborhoods the neighbors are forming federations of their own, made up of representatives of the various local societies. While this sort of community organization is sometimes sporadic or indefinite the settlements should be willing to support it both with money and workers. He warned the neighborhood worker never to forget that the primary duty of the settlement is to build up neighborhood life. He must, therefore, not permit what sometimes seems the larger aspects or implications of neighborhood life to sap his work at the roots.
Philip Davis of the Civic Service House suggested directions in which federated action among settlements might be directed. He showed that, outside of such oversight as the licensing of minors engaged in the street trades involved, the great mass of the minors of the community and the street merchants themselves are free to run into danger without possibility of interference or guarding from the outside. Immigrants are another class who will in the future be more and more in need of constructive human service, especially at the point of entrance on citizenship. The city, either through its officers or by delegating the work to others, should surround the gift of citizenship with appropriate safeguards and should make the process itself educational. The minimum wage is now becoming a significant problem all over the country and Mr. Davis believed that settlement workers should take their place among the pioneers in endeavoring to push its benefits.
Elizabeth Williams, of the College Settlement, New York, spoke of the enthusiasm of the pioneers and outlined some of the means of making the settlement ideal today as great a challenge to young men and women of capacity as it was to these early leaders.
Albert J. Kennedy of South End House discussed the question of federations of settlements in relation to the problem of club and class work. The chief task of the settlement is in his opinion to bring about the democratic organization of local communities in order that the people themselves may in time assume the task of local organization. The chief function of club work as such must be that of building up standards toward this end. The fear of rigidity which has oppressed certain critics of federation is, he believed, unfounded and there are, he held, great possibilities for settlement federations in enlarging and bringing to a high standard certain forms of craft work, dramatics, pageants and large recreational events.
At the evening meeting Jane E. Robbins spoke in behalf of definite work in training young Italian Americans as social workers who would contribute their enthusiasm for and knowledge of their own people definitely to the task of social re-construction and Americanization.
Vida D. Scudder believed settlement work should be made more fundamentally democratic and should give itself more definitely to the task of fostering and championing working class movements as such. The great danger of the settlement, she held, is that it will become one of the regular philanthropies rather than an advance station, as it were, in the progressive democratization of the national life. Settlement residents should be free at times of crisis to drop detail work for the larger task of assisting in the great forward movement of the people themselves.
George Hodges, dean of the Episcopal Theological School, believed that the church also should work along the lines suggested by Miss Scudder. He believed, however, the best achievement could be secured only on the high levels of personality.
John L. Elliott of the Hudson Guild held that it should more and more be the final effort of the settlement to bring the mothers and fathers into the streets, into the schools and into the dance halls that they may come to understand the conditions under which their children live, and contribute of their own experience and power in reorganizing communal life.
The meeting on Monday morning was opened by Abraham Rosenberg, the president of the Cloak and Suit Makers’ Union, who spoke of the work of the various settlement leaders in securing the New York protocol. He admitted a growing recognition on the part of labor leaders of the factor of public good will and service.
Mary P. Follett of the Roxbury League urged the continued necessity for social workers in the civic centre, and Gaylord S. White suggested the need of such influence in enlarging the scope and horizon of church work. Robert A. Woods summed up the more telling lines of interest opened up in the meeting. He urged that the significance of the settlement for the future, as for the past, lay not in any specific type of service or reform—valuable as nearly all such effort is—but in the development of social self sufficiency among the people from neighborhood to neighborhood throughout the country.
The use which the younger element made of a question box as the meeting ended led to the motion that at future conferences the junior speakers should have the floor for at least one session.