Larry Higginbottom, '98 M.S.W.

A culturally competent approach to working with urban populations

Larry Higginbottom is a fan of C-SPAN. He's captivated by the cable channel that provides public access to the political process, but he's often frustrated by what he sees.

"Over the years, I've watched numerous congressional votes allocate millions of dollars to programs that should be helping the people most in need, but I don't see their situation changing." That revelation prompted Higginbottom to consider a career in which he felt he could truly affect change. With prompting from a mentor, he decided in 1996 to go back to school to pursue a master's degree in social work from Simmons.

According to Higginbottom, he "lucked out" his first term at the SSW, securing a course load with the school's "heavy hitters," including Professors Abbie Frost, Mary Gilfus, Michael Melendez, Denise Humm-Delgado, and Ann Fleck-Henderson. It was Fleck-Henderson's "Human Behavior in the Social Environment" class that introduced him to the idea of cultural approaches to social work and sparked an idea for a business model that would eventually come to fruition.

In 2001, Higginbottom founded the Osiris Group, a non-profit organization founded to provide home-based, wrap-around services for urban families in Greater Boston. "I created Osiris to help professionals, parents, graduate student interns, youth workers, and others involved in working with the urban population understand the perspectives, view points, and value selections that Black and Latino peoples present. Our belief at Osiris is that we – as mental health providers – should not superimpose our own ideologies and culture on others, but rather help our clients make the correct choices within their own cultural realm. With proper education, social workers can become professionally trained and culturally competent and only then will they be professionally competent."

Higginbottom acknowledges that many social service agencies offer diversity among their social workers, but few of those social workers are empowered to provide clinical treatment from a culturally sensitive perspective. "I see a lot of window dressing – Black, Latino, Asian social workers employed at agencies, but none with the power to influence the organizational approach, which is all too often Euro-centered. What I respect about Simmons is that the professors are teaching students to provide direct practice from a multicultural perspective, and they are teaching their students to become leaders in social work and to affect organizational change."

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