Pioneering Contributions
Michael R. Daley, PHD, LMSW-AP, ACSW, truly has been a pioneer for social work in rural settings through his extensive involvement in social work practice, service, research, and education. His contributions are exceptional and they will make lasting impacts on social workers who practice in rural communities and with people with rural lifestyles all across the world.
In a long social work career as a practitioner and educator Michael Daley is best known for his contributions to the field of rural social work and for his advocacy for BSW education. Dr. Daley identified early in his career that the needs of rural social workers, clients, and communities were often overlooked in social work and he has been actively involved in attempts to increase the knowledge base, network with rural social workers, and to promote this under-represented field of practice.
Similarly, he entered social work at a time when the BSW was a reasonably new professional degree and was often underappreciated and understood, if not treated with outright disdain. In his work though the Association of Baccalaureate Social Work Program Directors, within CSWE, and NASW, he has served as a strong advocate for the BSW since the 1980s. More recently as editor of the Journal of Baccalaureate Social Work, he has been successful in strengthening the literature about the BSW.
He also has been an active contributor in service to professional social work organizations. His involvement in rural social work includes establishing (in 2009) and serving as initial editor for the rural social work journal, Contemporary Rural Social Work. He also has made significant contributions to the knowledge base in that field of practice, served as President for the Rural Social Work Caucus from 2007-2010, and contributed as an author to the NASW Rural Social Work Policy Statement since 2003. In 2015, he published Rural Social Work in the 21st Century, the first comprehensive book on the field of rural social work in more than 30 years.
While he spent a decade from 1994-2004 developing an MSW program with a rural-advanced generalist concentration, administering it, and teaching, Daley has maintained his passion for BSW education, and spent most of his career devoted to it. In professional and educational forums he has consistently promoted the value of BSW education in developing a more diverse workforce for working in public agencies, small nonprofits, and in working with the economically disadvantaged. When he served as President of the Association of Baccalaureate Social Work Program Directors (BPD), from 2010-2011, he worked collaboratively with representatives of other social work organizations to achieve more respect for BSW educators and practitioners, while improving the working relationships between BPD and these organizations. Under his leadership BPD enhanced its organizational and financial stability.
Dr. Daley has remained active in professional leadership and service across a broad spectrum of social work organizations. With NASW he was a member of the National Ethics Committee for several years, chairing it for two of them, from 2007-2009. He also was a board member of the Legal Defense Fund, and was a member of the Delegate Assembly multiple times. At the Chapter Level, he has been President (1999-2001) and Treasurer of the Texas Chapter (1995-1997) and Treasurer of the Alabama Chapter from 2011-2013. During his term as President of the NASW Texas Chapter, he was instrumental in removing the Social Work Associate for non-degreed social workers as a type of social work license. With the Council on Social Work Education, he was a member of the Council on Leadership Development, and is currently a member of the Commission on Accreditation. He also chaired the Alabama State Board of Social Work Examiners from 2014-2015. In all these positions he promoted the value of the social work profession, BSW level education and practice, and rural social work practice.
Career Highlights
Dr. Daley’s first social work employment was when he took a position as a child protective services worker in Houston, Texas in 1971. There, he worked as both a case worker and supervisor for five years. He later held positions at the Center for Social Work Research at the University of Texas at Austin and the Institute for Research on Poverty. He was employed as a faculty member in the BSW program at Bemidji State University from 1981-1984. He returned to Texas in 1984 as an Assistant Professor at Stephen F. Austin State University where he became BSW Director in 1986, when an MSW program that he developed was added he became Graduate Director and Director of the new School of Social Work. This was a position he held until 2002 when he returned to the faculty. He left to plan and implement a new BSW program at the University of South Alabama and remained in that position until 2011. He retired from South Alabama in 2015 and became BSW Director at Texas A & M University-Central Texas.
In his role as a scholar, he founded Contemporary Rural Social Work, the journal focused on the practice of social work with rural communities. He still serves on the editorial board of that journal. He has been the Editor-In-Chief of the Journal of Baccalaureate Social Work for the last five years (2014–2019), increasing the number of submissions, accepted articles, strengthening the impact factor, and facilitating the digital archiving of past issues. He currently reviews for Journal of Social Work Education, for which he won the Top Reviewer award in 2015. In 2015, he published the first comprehensive book on the rural social work field of practice in the United States in more than 30 years. He has published several articles on rural social work practice and ethics over the last 20 years.
He has been a member of NASW since 1973, the Council on Social Work Education since 1980, the Rural Social Work Caucus and the Association of Baccalaureate Social Work Program Directors since 1986. He also has served on the state of Alabama licensing board. He has made contributions at various levels of the social work profession, including social work education, practice, and licensing through his many service related activities at the local, state, and national levels.
Biographical Data
Michael Daley was born in Houston, Texas. He earned his BA in Anthropology from Rice University in 1971. While an undergraduate, he was an all-conference athlete in track and field. His first full-time job after graduation was as a children’s protective services worker. He remained with that work and enrolled in a MSW program with a concentration in macro practice from the University of Houston. He received his MSW in 1975. During his graduate study he worked full-time as a Child Protective Services Worker and a full-time student. He often was assigned some of the most serious emergency cases in the agency. In 1978 he decided to pursue his PhD in Social Welfare from the University of Wisconsin Madison, which he received in 1983.
He began his teaching career at the BSW level at Bemidji State University in Minnesota in 1981, and later moved to direct the BSW program at Stephen F. Austin State University in Nacogdoches for 16 years. While there in the mid-to-late 1990s, he developed and was the founding Director of the MSW program and helped to create the School of Social Work. The concentration for that program was rural and advanced generalist, neither of which were common at the time. In later years he returned to BSW education when he moved to Mobile, Alabama to develop and direct the BSW program in a community that had no social work education programs. In 2015 he returned to Texas where he is currently Professor and Chair of the Department of Social Work at Texas A & M University-Central Texas. Throughout his professional moves and employment, he developed a passion for undergraduate social work and living in smaller communities and has been a strong advocate for those aspects of the profession within social work.
Significant Achievements and Awards
- Best Reviewer 2015 – Journal of Social Work Education
- Social Worker of the Year 2009, Mobile Unit of the NASW, Alabama Chapter
- National Institute on Social Work and Human Services in Rural Areas, 2005. Certificate of Appreciation for Valuable Contributions to the Field of Rural Social Work
- Social Worker of the Year 1992, East Texas Unit of NASW-Texas
- Social Worker of the Year 2018, Central Texas Branch
Significant Publications
- Daley, M.R. & Pittman-Munke, P. (2016). Over the Hill to the Poor Farm: Rural History Almost Forgotten. Contemporary Rural Social Work, 8 (2), pp. 1-17. (9) 1, pp. 1-12.Retrieved from http://journal.minotstateu.edu/crsw/article/view/899/510.
- Daley, M. R. (2015). Rural social work in the 21st century. New York: Oxford University Press.
- Daley, M. R. (2015). There’s Nothing Just About a BSW Program! Journal of Baccalaureate Social Work. (22) 1, pp. 63-67.
- Daley, M.R. & Doughty, M.O., (2006). Ethics complaints in social work practice: A rural – urban comparison, Journal of Social Work Values and Ethics, (3), 1. Retrieved from http://www.socialworker.com/jswve/content/view/28/44/
- Daley, M. & Avant, F. (2004). Reconceptualizing the Framework for Practice, in Rural Social Work: Building and Sustaining Community Assets (pp. 34-42), T. L. Scales & C. L. Streeter eds., Thomson: Belmont, CA.
- Daley, M. R. & Avant, F. (1999). Attracting and retaining professionals for social work practice in rural areas: An example from east Texas, in Preserving and Strengthening Small Towns and Rural Communities (pp. 335-345), Iris B. Carlton-La Ney, Richard Edwards, and P. Nelson Reid, eds. NASW Press: Washington, D.C.
- Daley, M. R. (1979). Burnout: Smoldering problem in protective services (pp. 375-379), Social Work, 24(5).