Alumna Focuses Social Work Career on Giving Voice to the Voiceless
In clinical practice, she came alongside those in pain and helped them move toward healing
As a child of the late ’60s and early ’70s, Cynthia Schendel grew up seeing historically under-represented groups of people in America protest, march and raise consciousness as they fought for the rights and voice they had long been denied. What she saw playing out on the national stage, from the women’s movement to the civil rights movement, resonated with her and helped lay the foundation for a lifelong career in social work.
“There was a lot of emphasis on equality and respect for groups that had not previously had respect and certainly were not treated equally. That meshed with my Christian beliefs about all people being worthy of care and equality. That was the ideological and foundational basis for my interest in social service,” she shares. “Social welfare is that voice for a lot of those values — equality, diversity, meeting people where they are, nonjudgment, not imposing your idea of how they should live.”
Fast forward a few years later. On a high school field trip to the Lansing Correctional Facility, a state prison located in Lansing, Kans., Schendel gained some clarity on the role she wanted to play in her career, to give voice to those she saw as voiceless. “I thought that every person had a responsibility to identify the people in the world they were most uniquely qualified to help,” she remembers. “We were doing a unit on criminal justice, and visiting the prison really clicked for me. This was a group almost nobody cared about. They were vilified, and very few people were willing to work with or help them.”
Schendel went on to earn her bachelor’s in criminal justice from Sam Houston State University and worked in the field for several years. She saw that many caught up in the system had traumatic histories that, if addressed in therapy, might have altered their choices. So, she decided to pursue her MSW at KU to become a clinical social worker.
She says, “Social welfare, of all the mental health-based fields, aligned most closely with my values — the whole person in environment approach made — and still makes — the most sense to me: The idea that the problems people face might have some roots in themselves, but also in society around them, in the culture they grow up in, the messages they receive in the capitalist system and how that is rigged to keep generational wealth going and to exclude large groups from reaching that level of success.”
Once she received her LSCSW, Schendel went into private practice in Overland Park, Kans., where she worked for 25 years until her retirement in 2016. At the time, she says, very few social workers were in private practice. And few therapists were willing to work with children and adolescents. So, she opened her doors to young people, families, and adults.
“It was the opportunity to come alongside someone in pain, look at their situation with them and loan them my ‘outside’ eyes. Then helping them find solutions — within them and in the environment around them,” she explains. “I loved the idea that helping the person in my office to feel and function better could then ripple out into their relationships with others. Someone who has done their work can stop destructive generational patterns and be a healthier partner, parent, worker and friend. It made the work feel very impactful.”
Throughout her career, and even in retirement, Schendel has been an advocate for the field of social welfare and for those it touches. For example, she served as the president of the Kansas chapter of the National Association of Social Workers, was a member on the Johnson County Commission on Aging and is currently a member of the Johnson County Juvenile Corrections Advisory Board and the Kansas Behavioral Sciences Regulatory board.
As she looks over the field of social welfare and the changes it has undergone during the span of her career, she sees one thing that has and will remain constant: “This need for a voice for the voiceless. That hasn’t changed and won’t ever change. The people who are voiceless may change or shift some, but there will always be that need. That’s why I’m glad there are still people who want to be social workers.”
Schendel Establishes Scholarship to Support Future Social Workers
As the demand for highly qualified social workers continues to grow in Kansas and beyond, Cynthia Schendel feels passionately about finding ways to expand the workforce by helping more people get into the social welfare field. That’s why she established the Cynthia A. Schendel Scholarship in Clinical Social Work in 2020. The scholarship provides financial assistance to a student in the KU School of Social Welfare who is pursuing their MSW and wants to be a clinical social worker.
“One of the big reasons I wanted to establish the scholarship is that I want to replace myself, at least, or have several people who might end up working in the field and support people in whatever ways they need.”
She was thrilled to meet the first recipient of her scholarship. “She wanted to be a social worker for a lot of the same reason I did,” Schendel says. “It’s very gratifying to see someone going down that path and to give them support and validate their choice to enter a field that is never going to make them rich. If you can make it possible for people to get the education without being in huge amounts of debt, that’s a worthy goal.”
