“Caring for Our Own”

This article traces the founding of Senior Action in a Gay Environment (SAGE), the nation’s oldest and largest social service organization for LGBT elders. Drawing on archival documentation as well as interviews with SAGE founders and early members, the article shows how SAGE was born of two largely disconnected social transformations: the gay and lesbian movement and the national expansion of services and programs for the elderly that was enabled by the Older Americans Act of 1965. SAGE’s institutionalization and its relationship with the state allowed it to grow in an increasingly conservative political context while ensuring that the organization would not take a broadly intersectional approach to the challenges gay and lesbian elders faced. Despite its political limitations, however, SAGE provided a setting in which some white gay and lesbian elders began to see themselves as agents of social change.

SOCIO-PSYCHOLOGICAL PROBLEMS OF TRAINING THE HEAD OF A SOCIAL SERVICE ORGANIZATION AT A UNIVERSITY (MASTER'S LEVEL)

В статье автором раскрывается необходимость подготовки руководителя организации социального обслуживания в вузе на уровне магистратуры. Выделяются особенности подготовки руководителя организации социального обслуживания в высшей школе, а также дана характеристика социально-психологических проблем их профессиональной подготовки. In the article, the author reveals the need to train the head of the social service organization at the University at the master's level. The article highlights the features of training the head of a social service organization in higher education, as well as the characteristics of socio-psychological problems of their professional training.

En’owkin Centre Breastfeeding Art Expo

A unique Indigenous-focused Art Expo on the topic of breastfeeding was held at En’owkin Centre at Penticton Indian Band in October and November 2017. The En’owkin Centre is a nationally recognized Indigenous arts and training centre. This review highlights some of the art from the En’owkin Indigenous Expo including six of the Community Art Projects and three Independent Art pieces. The En’owkin Breastfeeding Art Expo was part of a larger Expo (2017-2018) that is a joint partnership with Interior Health and the non-profit social service organization KCR-Community Resources; it was funded by five organizations. With 35 community partners, the project was led by a ten-member steering committee that including two Indigenous members. The Expo offered a full-colour Art Catalogue and a Teacher’s Guide. The larger Expo travelled to six locations in the Interior of British Columbia, and included 15 large community art projects and 65 independent artworks by citizens of central British Columbia, as well as 20 short videos that tell the significant art and health stories. Art is recognized as an important tool for Indigenous people for health and healing. This Expo was an opportunity to celebrate community, art, and breastfeeding. The goals of the Expo were multi-faceted, namely, to increase awareness of the benefits of breastfeeding, to encourage new ways of thinking about health through art, and to support work towards establishing better care for women to breastfeed in the hospital and community.

Working within Discretionary Boundaries: Allocative Rules, Exceptions, and the Micro-Foundations of Inequ(al)ity

Organizations tasked with allocating limited resources face obvious distributive dilemmas. Allocative rules – when applied universally – seek to limit the discretion of organizational members and mitigate disparate treatment. Yet, particularistic needs often warrant exceptions to such rules and accept unequal treatment in the interest of equity. I argue that organizational members engage in a form of boundary work, which I call discretion work, to manage discretionary boundaries around the application of allocative rules versus exceptions. Discretion work functions through semi-institutionalized ‘rules of exceptionalism,’ which involve continual boundary-testing. Relying on ethnographic fieldwork at a French social service organization, enriched by interviews with service providers, I identify three types of discretion work – procedural, symbolic, and evaluative – which govern how, for whom, and for what purpose allocative decisions are made. The article contributes to institutional perspectives on inequality by a) articulating the micro-practices that (re)produce inequitable resource allocation at the bottom of the social ladder, and b) theorizing the often overlooked distinction between principles of equity and equality.