Form Of New Services Research Articles

An Outreach Approach to Facilitating the Transition from Military to Civilian Life: A Critical Choice Point for the Drug Dependent

This paper describes experience with an exciting new form of service that can be offered at a crisis or transition point in the client's life: re-entry into his home community. An application of crisis theory, the approach utilizes outreach methods rather than regular institutional contacts. The transition between military life and return home presents acute dilemmas for returnees, particularly those who adopted new patterns of alcohol or drug use. Drug use may have filled a need during military service, but may pose new problems at home. Correspondingly, the brief transitional period of re-entry presents some degree of crisis and decision for new veterans. (A crisis refers to special new demands or pressures whose immediate resolution lie beyond the client's usual repertoire of responses or skills.) This paper presents the rationale, design, and objectives of a re-entry program utilized with 83 men returning from Southeast Asia, many of whom had been exposed to heroin. The paper does not describe the nature of our clients' drug problems or an evaluation of program effectiveness, both of which will be presented in a subsequent publication. Rather, its focus is on the operational problems encountered, for the ability to anticipate such difficulties would be an asset to those contemplating the establishment of comparable programs.

The Vocational Choices of Negro College Students in North Carolina

North Carolina has fourteen institutions of higher learning for Negroes, five of which are publicly supported and controlled; the remainder are supported in part by the church but to a far greater extent by philanthropic organizations of various types. These institutions are scattered throughout the state, every section being represented except the Carolina Highlands where the population is nearly 100 per cent native white. Only in two cases is more than one institution located in the same city, two being at Raleigh, the capital of the state, and three at Greensboro. One of thelatter is a coeducational college, one a women's college, and one a religious denominational institution for both sexes. The total population of the state, according to the 1930 census, was 3,170,276. Of this number, 28.9 per cent were Negroes. Of the 21 cities and towns with populations of 10,000 or more, one has a population of which more than half are Negroes, and six have populations of which from 25 per cent to 40 per cent are Negroes. In these cities and towns, 21.2 per cent of all the Negoes in the state are concentrated. With such a relatively large concentration in the principal cities of the state, many of which are important business and industrial centers, there is an unusually good opportunity for Negroes to develop businesses of their own. In two of the principal cities namely, Durham and Winston-Salem, Negroes have already developed several large business enterprises. There is opportunity for the graduates of Negro colleges to develop more such businesses and also to branch out into new forms of service to their people.