Social work professor wins UW service award

UW Tacoma Assistant Professor Marian Harris will be honored for service to the community with the Martin Luther King Jr. Volunteer Recognition/Community Service Award.

Presented annually by the UW Health Sciences department, the award recognizes Harris for her commitment to empowering communities of color and children and families in the child welfare system. The award will be presented Thursday, Jan. 11 as part of the annual Martin Luther King Jr. tribute sponsored by Health Sciences and the UW Medical Center.

Harris, whose parents were involved in the civil rights movement of the 1960s, said the award is particularly significant to her.

"This award probably means more to me than any other award I have received," she said. "As a person of color, and as a person who grew up when Dr. King was still alive, I feel honored. This validates the work that I have been doing."

Harris teaches in the Social Work program at UW Tacoma and is a nationally-recognized advocate for poor and oppressed African-American birth mothers and their children in the child welfare system. Her research and volunteer work focus on the disproportionality of children of color in the child welfare system.

"I feel very strongly that no child should grow up in the child welfare system," Harris said.

Harris also volunteers at the Oasis of Hope Center (Greater Christ Temple Church) in Tacoma's Hilltop community, where she helps train board members for the youth program and day-care center for at-risk youth and children. She has also advocated for children of color as a member of the King County Racial Disproportionality Task Force and on the National Race Matters Consortium, has served as chair of the Children's Alliance of Washington Public Policy Council and is a member of the Cultural Competency Task Group for the State of Washington Mental Health Transformation Project. Harris was recently appointed by the Tacoma City Council to serve as a member of the Citizen's Review Panel for the Tacoma Police Department.

Harris earned her Ph.D. in 1997 from the Smith College School for Social Work and joined the UW Tacoma faculty in 2002.