AIRED: September 22, 2014– 11 am PST
TITLE: “Like a Child to Home”
SPECIAL GUEST: Katherine Ketcham
Bill Engleson’s first novel, Like a Child to Home, is a powerful and original take on what it means to be a social worker. He presents a portrait of a social worker, Wally Rose, whose major attributes are compassion, patience, commitment and resilience.
Engleson paints a realistic portrait on just how hard it can be to gain the trust of injured youth, and the importance of establishing trust as a prerequisite to help young people find answers or accept advice and direction.
Like a Child to Home provides insight into how easy it is for these young people to transform their fears into aggressiveness and isolation as they struggle with family distress, drug use and violence. Without support from experienced people, the choices young people make can tarnish their lives forever. For any society this is a disgrace.
Even though the value of a child’s life is incommensurable, sometimes social workers are limited by the very system they toil in.Bill puts so well on paper the pressure social workers face, trying mightily to put into place resolutions that will be in the best interest of each child. As he has made clear, this work need a lot of commitment and dedication, and the social workers’ personal life is often secondary
ABOUT BILL ENGLESON
Bill Engleson worked in the child welfare arena for more than 25 years, most of them as a front-line, journeyman government protection social worker. He surprised himself by taking his leave in March 2002 after a timely early retirement offer.
Shortly thereafter, Bill began an exhilarating eighteen months journey as a program manager for an eclectic urban social service agency, The Lower Mainland Purpose Society.
In December 2003 he moved from the Lower Mainland of to Denman Island, a small island off of the east coast of Vancouver Island . His key activities since then have been writing in a number of genres, community volunteering in the arts and social services.
He has written Like a Child to Home principally to depict, in fictional form, aspects of the demanding child welfare world he encountered, experiences not often explored in literature. Like a Child to Home is also very much meant to be a means of paying tribute to the amazingly resilient young people that he met along the way as well as to the hard working adults who shared that journey.
