A Comparison Of Florence Kelley And Jane Addams As An Agent Of Change

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As kids, many of us grow up with stories of super heroes and people of greater power that help the helpless. We grow up thinking that only bad things happen in stories where heroic mutants can fix it. As adults, we start to see how messy the world is and wish those super heroes in stories were real. Just like Marvel has their Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D., the real world has social workers, who act as agents of change. An agent of change in the field of Social Work seeks to improve or restructure parts of the system that could be flawed or in some way harming people’s well-being. An agent of change advocates for others and promotes social and economic justice; change is initiated on behalf of individual people or groups of people to provide services or resources and to change or encourage change for policies (Kirst-Ashman, 2016). Two people that are great examples of being agents of change are Florence Kelley and Jane Addams. Known for doing more than any other average American in the 20th century, Florence Kelley is the “Pioneer of Labor Reform” (Dreier, 2012). Florence was concerned …show more content…

Jane Addams is a widely known social worker, who founded Hull House in Chicago. (Moyer, 2003). She is also known as a sociologist, feminist, pacifist, and criminologist (Moyer, 2003). Just like Florence Kelley, Jane Addams interest for helping those in need started when she was young. Her father took her to see his mill, and the mill was located where people were in utmost poverty and living in small houses. The day her father took her to the mill was the day that she swore to have a large house built where a lot of small, unpleasant houses were, and she did fulfil her promise when she created the Hull House (Moyer, 2003). The Hull House was the first settlement house in the United States, and its purpose was to serve the needs of the poor and restore communications between the classes. (Moyer,

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