Knee/Wittman Lifetime Achievement
Joan Levy Zlotnik, PhD, ACSW
Joan Levy Zlotnik is known as a "connector," "opener", "mentor" and "research yenta." For more than 35 years, across three national social work organizations, her work strengthened the profession by building bridges among research, practice, policy and education; developing relationships with federal agencies; partnering with national organizations; and collaborating with practitioners and educators. Her national career began in 1987 when she was hired at NASW to implement an initiative to promote professional social work practice in public child welfare. A few months after she expanded her efforts beyond child welfare to include family caregiving and aging, with a major focus on implementation of nursing home reform legislation. Dr. Zlotnik’s work on these agendas continues to this day!
After 7 years she moved to CSWE, implementing numerous foundation-funded projects and advocating for social work education funding. For nine years she led the Institute for the Advancement of Social Work Research (IASWR), raising the visibility of social work research contributions in many fields, playing a key role in national research coalitions, and implementing programs to train social work researchers within academia and agencies. As the founding director of the NASW Social Work Policy Institute she continued to address workforce issues, worked with Congress and federal agencies to implement the Social Work Reinvestment Initiative, and hosted numerous convenings on issues ranging from evidence-based practice, to supervision, to hospice, to social work practice doctorates, and to policy practice careers.
Over the course of three decades, the multi-faceted child welfare workforce strategy, included outreach to the Children’s Bureau and collaborations with volunteer leaders and other national organizations. She convened symposia, spearheaded publications and presentations of research, and partnered with her government relations colleague to insert legislative report language that recognized the importance of social work to child welfare. Dr. Zlotnik successfully advocated for more targeted use of Title IV-E and Title IV-B funding to educate social workers for child welfare careers.
Dr. Zlotnik also worked with the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) as well as aging and nursing home experts and organizations to address the importance of psychosocial care for older adults. At NASW she garnered funding from the Administration on Aging; and while at CSWE she received the first grant to a social work organization from the John A. Hartford Foundation’s social work initiative.
Dr. Zlotnik served on many national expert panels and was a consultant to the Children’s Bureau and to the National Institutes of Health. She garnered federal and foundation funding, edited special issues of journals and created an Oxford Press book series on building research capacity. Among her honors was the University of Maryland’s 50 Heroes for Justice and 2011 Alumni of the Year. She is an NASW Social Work Pioneer and was honored by the NIH Social Work Research Working Group, the CSWE Child Welfare Symposium, the Associate Deans for Research, and AGE-SW. She has an MSSW from the University of Wisconsin-Madison and a PhD from the University of Maryland School of Social Work.