As Liv interns at FASD United, she will be sharing the things she is learning and doing to inspire and explore FASD awareness through a public health lens. In her time with our organization, she will have opportunities to experience the roundedness of our programs, aid in important projects, and explore her understanding through reflection.

“It was another exciting week at FASD United!

This week my main focus was the fact sheets. I was lucky enough to get feedback from the team on what they thought I should adjust, add, or take away from my redesigns. It was pretty challenging to fit all of the information, such as the citations and images, into two pages on Canva. This project has taken me
longer than I expected, however, it has been one of my favorite projects that I have worked on so far. I consider myself a perfectionist, so I want to make sure that everything is ready to go before we share it with the public. I am pretty much finished with the overall content for the fact sheets, but I still have some tweaking to do. I’m hoping to get them finished up soon.

I am writing this before conducting an interview for National Social Work Month with Casidee. This is my first interview, so I’m very excited to finally get to experience what an interview typically looks like and the process of it. I am especially excited about this interview because I helped create some of the questions for the individual we are interviewing. There is one specific question that I am very excited to hear about. The question is, “What communication strategies do you use to build trust with clients, specifically in situations where it can be challenging to establish? (for example: when a client is distressed…)”. I know that social work can be extremely rewarding but also very emotionally challenging. I am so intrigued to
know what a social worker does to work with people who are in tense situations. I’m also curious if there is any specific training for dealing with stressful situations for people with FASD. I would hope that there would be intensive and extensive training for social workers to be knowledgeable about FASD so they do not stigmatize or potentially disrespect the people they work with who have FASD. I wonder if there is a difference between how you engage situations depending on whether an individual has an FASD. I’m going to take extensive notes and hopefully get to share them with you guys later on from my experience!

I’m excited to finally wrap up the fact sheets and feel 100% confident in them for distribution. I’m also working on creating some general templates on Canva, which I enjoy since I love using my creative mindset. I hope everyone has a wonderful week and thank you for reading!”

Reflection from 3/4 to 3/8 2024