HUSV 388: Community Sustainability and Human Service Principles & Applications

Course Description

This course will put the word “Sustainability” spirit into the HSL program curriculum and human service practice. In human services we are bent on improving the human conditions in our global community, particularly by listening and taking seriously minorities’ voices in the “developed” world and women’s and poor men’s voices in “developing” countries. This analysis of environmental problems is linked specifically to life chances outcomes and more generally to quality of life and essential freedoms. The NOHSE code of ethics requires you as a human services professional, to advocate for the disadvantaged in your community, so that they have fair access to education for capacity building, healthcare and job training: racial, gender, sex-orientation and age equity; environmental risk reduction and protection from impoverishment. Advocacy for the disadvantaged is best thought of not as a social goal in and of itself, but as inherently embedded in the pursuit of social justice. Therefore, your understanding of these environmental problems, your logical evaluation of society’s responses to them, and your ability to advocate for the disadvantaged in the execution of duty in your human services career, are important goals of this course.