Paige Walker along with Isabel Rose, NASW-NYS Chapter President and Reinaldo Cardona, NASW-NYS Executive Director

Photo courtesy of NASW-NYS

 Congratulations to V. Paige Walker

2012 NYS-NASW Social Work Student of the Year

The Department of Social Work is very pleased to congratulate V. Paige Walker who was named the 2012 Student of the Year by the New York State Chapter of the National Association of Social Workers. Paige received her baccalaureate degree from Bryn Mawr College and recently completed her MSW this May 2012 at Binghamton's College of Community and Public Affairs.

While at BU, Paige served as vice president of the MSW Graduate Student Organization. In this leadership role, Paige helped organize and participate in a Red Cross Disaster Mental Health Training Workshop. She also coordinated volunteer and donation efforts among students at BU and personally offered assistance with disaster mental health and clean-up efforts in response to the devastating floods in September 2011 in the Southern Tier.

Paige's interest in gerontology was fostered during her 2010-2011 internship with the Hartford Partnership Program in Aging. Her internship here centered on providing supportive case management services for uninsured senior citizens with chronic illnesses in rural communities through the Rural Health Network of South Central New York. Paige's second internship was with the SHARE (Safe Healthy Attitudes Require Education) Project (part of the federal Safe Schools – Healthy Students program), where she focused on anti-bullying education in individual and group settings, advising a student-led anti-bullying group and doing innovative family engagement activities with families in rural areas in the Whitney Point community.

Paige was honored during the 2012 Spirit of Social Work Awards Luncheon at the annual New York State NASW Power of Social Work Conference in Albany on March 16th, 2012. She was joined at this event by her family that drove from Virginia and Binghamton for the event, as well as by her field instructor, Luann Kida, and Social Work Department Chair, Laura Bronstein.