Banerjee has spent her career in social welfare combatting income poverty
Retiring faculty member has led work in India and the United States focused on social justice and income equality
Growing up in Kolkata, India, Mahasweta Banerjee learned at a very early age about income inequality, and the power of social welfare to transform the lives of both social workers and those they serve. After all, she had one of the most famous teachers: Mother Teresa, winner of the Nobel Peace Prize who gained international acclaim for her ministry to India’s under-resourced people through medical clinics, orphanages and schools.
When she was in middle school, Banerjee, Ph.D., professor and director of the BSW program in the KU School of Social Welfare, remembers the day Mother Teresa visited her school to talk about her work. Then, even more powerful, Banerjee’s class took a field trip to observe one of Mother Teresa’s homes for abandoned children.
“That did something to my heart,” Banerjee remembers. “Children should not be suffering. I could help them to arrive at a better place. So that is what drew me to social work.”
Banerjee, who will retire from KU at the end of the 2022–2023 academic year, has spent her entire career, first in India then in the United States, focused on understanding social and economic justice and combatting income inequality, and educating countless social work professionals to meet the needs of those who experience it.
“There is so much unfinished business, and you have so much energy. It’s a different world, where more things are permissible, so you will bring about lots of change. There are lots of opportunities, lots of ways of making things better for people in social work.”
Banerjee’s first field practicum placement as a master or arts in social work student at the Tata Institute of Social Sciences in Mumbai was in one of the city’s low-income housing areas. While there, she says, “I realized a lot of the problems that we as social workers were dealing with had to do with income poverty. Health issues like infectious diseases, diabetes, domestic violence and alcoholism — many of these things were rooted in poverty. In the case of domestic violence, it was not that people were bad, but they were dealing with so much.”
She realized that few social work professionals at the time were trying to address the issue of income poverty, doing the work that she believed would get to the root of the problems she saw played out in the lives of the families she served in Mumbai and Kolkata. So, this became her life’s mission.
In 1987, she came to the United States to study at Washington University in St. Louis, where she earned both an MSW in social research and a Ph.D. in social work from. She joined the KU faculty in the fall of 1992, drawn by the progressive, supportive and affirming atmosphere she recognized in the school.
At KU and before, Banerjee embraced her many roles — researcher, professor, administrator, mentor — to build an extensive body of published work. She has won numerous honors, including the Best Conceptual Article in the Journal of Social Work Education in 2011, awarded by the Council of Social Work Education. She has also been given numerous teaching awards, including the Woodyard International Educator Award and the Budig Award for Teaching Excellence.
Much of her scholarship has focused on micro-entrepreneurial training programs. For example, in 2001 and 2002, she was the principal investigator for the Micro-entrepreneurial Training Program, a pilot income-patching initiative in Kansas City, Kans. She led a similar pilot in Northeast Kansas in 1999.
“I studied microloan programs that had started in India,” Banerjee shares. “But the traditional thinking in the United States is that if you need to earn money, go out and get a job. But for some people, wage employment was not feasible. If they had young children or experienced racism, getting and keeping jobs is difficult. So, I worked with women who were public assistance cash recipients, and the idea was to help them learn to start a small business and launch it.”
Throughout her career, Banerjee has traveled frequently to India to contribute to the social welfare work being done there and to gain knowledge that has helped inform her work at KU. For instance, from 2007–2008 she received a Fulbright Senior Research Award in India to study capabilities that allow economically disadvantaged people to work and earn an income in West Bengal. Later, she used this work to inform her research on financial capability of people in Lawrence, Kans.
She also created a School of Social Welfare study abroad course in India, which she led for nearly 15 years, so students could study the approaches to social welfare used in India. “It was very satisfying because there I was in Delhi talking about income inequality, power and politics. It’s one thing to teach this in a classroom, but when you are there, it affects the students differently.”
Pausing to look back over her career, Banerjee takes stock of all she has helped accomplish, and the work that must still be done by future generations of social workers. “We have come a long way, but then some of the old problems still exist. Yes, we have worked on them, but I can’t say they have all gone away, and new problems have emerged, and new ideas have emerged.”
She is optimistic about the future of social welfare and the role it will play in improving the lives of all. She applauds the new focus on diversity, equity and inclusion; anti-racist, ant-oppressive methods; and socially just research and practice. “That gives me a lot of hope because earlier, the dominant culture had its views and ways of going about business. But that foundation has been shaken by all these movements that have been going on. And voices that have been marginalized and oppressed are slowly coming out and new things are happening. And that gives me tremendous hope.”
