Rebecca Camargo, M.S.W.’15
One year after graduating from the master of social work program at Boston College, Rebecca Camargo was hired as the first director of resident services for the Newton, Massachusetts, Housing Authority.
Her accomplishments at the city’s largest provider of affordable housing included developing mental health services for low-income residents, creating an annual survey to collect feedback from tenants, and increasing the amount of yearly grant funding to the Resident Services Department from $12,500 to nearly $300,000.
Camargo credits her experience at the Boston College School of Social Work with helping her build the program from the ground up, and she considers her achievements at the Newton Housing Authority among the most impressive feats of her decade-long career in social work.
“Pretty much every decision I made, particularly in the first two years, was from Boston College’s playbook,” says Camargo, M.S.W.’15, who worked for the Newton Housing Authority from 2016 to 2022. “I was literally going through my old classroom files, thinking ‘How do we build a program? How do we plan strategically?’”
Now Camargo can add another big accomplishment to her curriculum vitae, having recently been named the winner of BCSSW’s 2024 Distinguished Recent Alumni Award for her contributions to the field of social work.
She will will be honored for her achievements as part of the School’s annual Equity, Justice, and Inclusion Lecture and Distinguished Alumni Award Celebration on Monday, October 21 at 6 p.m. in the Yawkey Center.
“To me, this award means that I have made really meaningful connections with people who have looked out for me and got to bear witness to my career so far,” says Camargo, who belonged to BCSSW’s Latinx Leadership Initiative, a cohort-based program that prepares students to work with Latinx communities to create sustainable solutions to complex problems. “It’s a testament to the social work network and to the professional family that you build over the course of your professional life.”
We asked Camargo to reflect on her experience at BCSSW and how it’s shaped her career path.
First of all, congratulations on being selected to receive the 2024 Distinguished Recent Alumni Award. What does this award mean to you?
When I found out that I had won this award, I was surprised. There are so many exceptional people doing really exciting things in my graduating class alone, and I didn’t think that the work that I had been doing would be considered distinguished in any way.
To me, this award means that I have made really meaningful connections with people who have looked out for me and got to bear witness to my career so far. It’s a testament to the social work network and to the professional family that you build over the course of your professional life. These are the people who can really see you and say, “Hey, what you’re doing is meaningful and worth celebrating.”
Speaking of people who have celebrated your work, Ximena Soto, the assistant director of the LLI, nominated you for this award. How would you describe the impact she’d had on your career?
Ximena is wonderful. Our relationship really developed more fully after I graduated and started working as a field advisor at BCSSW. She was a role model for me in terms of the way she relates to people, maintains her networks, and shows up for people.
I’m also inspired by the impact she’s making on bilingual and bicultural social workers through the Latinx Leadership Initiative. I was part of the first graduating class of LLI students, and to see the level of funds coming through the initiative today and the ways in which they are thinking about equity has been very exciting.
What did the LLI mean to you?
The LLI gave me the opportunity to be part of a really rich community of people who shared cultural connections and a desire to serve Latinx populations. We talk a lot about trying to decentralize a white Western perspective, and that’s really hard to do as an individual in a class. But with the Latinx Leadership Initiative, you do that over time in the coursework. And so you have this other tool that you can use in the field, especially as you gain more power and responsibility.
Much of your work over the past decade has focused on reducing homelessness. You currently work as a consultant for Focus Strategies, a firm that provides communities with strategic, data-informed technical assistance to reduce homelessness. Prior to Focus Strategies, you served as the inaugural director of resident services at the Newton Housing Authority, where you developed supportive services and eviction prevention programming for formerly unsheltered individuals living with complex mental health needs. Why is homelessness such an important issue for you?
I like to say that I inherited housing work—that it’s like a family business—because my grandmother was a classic street social worker. She immigrated here from Peru in the 70s, moved to Lawrence, Massachusetts, which is where I grew up, and became an advocate for people in her community. If people didn’t speak English, she would go with them to appointments and was always doing community-based work.
My mom has been in the housing field almost her entire career and worked for the City of Lawrence Community Development Department, with a focus on the First Time Home Buyer Program. She was also a single mom, and when I was growing up, we would switch apartments pretty frequently and oftentimes go back to my grandparents’ house, which they owned. Through her work and her personal life, she saw just how important it was to have a home that you own, that can be an asset that you pass down generationally. For me, moving around, there was always uncertainty about where we were going to stay next.
Right after college, I participated in the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. I just so happened to get placed at East Bay Community Law Center in California, where I worked predominantly with folks who were unhoused and who were getting citations for sleeping on the sidewalk. I didn’t mean to go out and do street outreach—it’s just how it played out. The experience made me realize that housing is a human right, and so when I went back to social work school, I knew that homelessness was an issue that was worthy of dedicating my professional career to.
How did your experiences at BCSSW prepare you to address homelessness?
I completed one of my field placements at Heading Home, Inc., a nonprofit in Massachusetts that provides emergency shelter in addition to transitional and permanent housing for children and adults. As a case manager for a 21-bed shelter, I made rounds and got in-depth training in motivational interviewing. I met with each of my clients once a week for one hour. Half of that time was spent doing traditional case management, where I helped clients create housing plans and fill out housing applications. The other half was spent conducting motivational interviewing, which involved discussing clients’ goals and how to reach them.
This was a foundational learning experience for me, particularly the exposure to motivational interviewing as a short term case management tool and intervention modality. Whether you were a clinician or a frontline staff member, you were required to get training in motivational interviewing regularly and continuously. This was the first time I got to see a model where clinicians brought all their skills to the work in addition to following a foundational approach in order to create equity in the quality of services being delivered—and I took that philosophy with me to the Newton Housing Authority.
It seems like you leaned pretty heavily on what you learned at BCSSW to help you excel in your role at the Newton Housing Authority.
I had the opportunity to be hired to build the Newton Housing Authority’s resident services program from the ground up. There was no one in the position who had been a social worker before, and the board of commissioners charged me with building this program in a way that would be clinically responsive. Pretty much every decision I made, particularly in the first two years, was from Boston College’s playbook. I was literally going through my old classroom files, thinking “How do we build a program? How do we plan strategically?”
We partnered with Boston College interns, who completed a program-wide needs assessment, and then we started implementing the recommendations from that needs assessment. One of the recommendations was that we needed language access on staff, so we hired a bilingual social worker who spoke Mandarin and English. Ultimately, the program grew. And when I left, every single person in the program was a bilingual, bicultural social worker. It was all as a result of those core data-gathering skills and program development skills that came from the BC program—it was like the BC theoretical playbook built that program. And so it’s one of the things I’m most proud of.
What’s the most rewarding part of working at Focus Strategies?
The firm solely focuses on projects related to ending homelessness, and it’s very rewarding to see how the changes we make, even if they’re small changes, make big impacts on the systems level. We do equity analysis, needs assessments, strategic planning, technical assistance with federal and state funding, and program evaluation.
We get to make recommendations to our clients, which include communities across the United States, and even suggest how those recommendations get implemented. Our clients make these changes, and then you have this sort of hope that maybe not tomorrow and maybe not in a year, but maybe in a couple of years, there will be permanent changes that enable folks to have a more equitable experience in the homelessness response system.
How did the faculty at BCSSW influence your philosophy as a social worker?
A professor named Paul Kline did a fantastic job of reinforcing the need to have compassion for people but also an understanding of the relationship between people and their environment. It’s sometimes easy to fall into a pitfall where you wonder “Why don’t people just make different decisions?” But Professor Kline structured his class in a way to make you understand the person both as the person that’s presenting in front of you and the context with which they’re in.
For example, in his Social Work and Spirituality class, we worked with folks who were involved with gangs. How do you look at a gang as a community, as a network, and as an environment in addition to the people in them, who are both suffering from the effects of being gang-involved, and also in some ways benefiting from being connected to this community? So that was very helpful and has translated into all of the work that I’ve done in terms of being able to be truly compassionate when I’m working with folks.
The theme of BCSSW’s Equity, Justice, and Inclusion lecture this year is “Contemplation in Formation.” It’s also the new theme of the school’s EJI Initiative, which is calling on students to spend time in self-reflection to look within, make sense of their experiences, and identify their deepest desires. How did formative education—a guided process that helps students find purpose, live fulfilling lives, and understand the world around them—factor into your experience at BCSSW?
The social work program at BC gives students the opportunity to unpack the self in the work, especially through process recordings about field placements. And for me, that was one of the most critical components of my experience at Boston College.
The program made me look in a mirror from day one. My professors said “Keep the mirror up, this is part of the work.” And when you do this work, you have to carve out the time to be able to answer hard questions about your own actions—Why did I do that? Why did I say that? Why did I react like that?
