Anita Taboh

Perseverance. Once I started working and got my education, I found that if I kept going and kept learning I could do just about anything. I just kept on trucking. When it came to my job, I just kept on learning. I did whatever I could to learn new things and new ways of doing things, new treatment modalities, whatever, and it just paid off.

Pay attention to the women who came before you.

I would tell them to try different types of socialwork. I didn't stick with just one. I started out in a shelter for homeless, runaway, throwaway youth, and then I went into prevention, and then into foster care, and I worked in adult day health care. I did some for-profit work too, which does pay a lot better, but I always enjoyed the not-for-profit work more. You have to move around. You have to try different kinds before you find the one that speaks the loudest to you. For me, it was working with youth, and I never would have expected that, ever. But that was where I was the happiest. And let's face it, social work does not exactly pay the most money of anything. It's gotta be where you're the happiest at what you're doing. It was worth whatever sacrifice I made financially. I could get the most satisfaction out of what I was doing, and that's the way I always looked at it. And find a mentor. Find a mentor, do it, because it will be so valuable to you in the long run. For young people, I really suggest they try different kinds. A lot of people will go to an agency and either come, do two years, and move on because it was there for education, really, or they come and they stay forever. It's not something I suggest. I really say, get out there and try different things and find that passion.

The thing about working with people is that you cannot hold up a product to the lovely people in our government and say, here, look at what I made, we can sell it now, because we don't have a product to sell. Therefore, they don't see it as something that's going to make the country money. They don't actually see the value of what they're going to be able to derive from it. They don't turn around and put back into it what they really should, because we are doing something that's going to help people become much more functional in the economy. Unfortunately, the people that are doing the work do not get the money that they should for what they're doing, at least in my perspective.

In work, figure out what values are important to my clients and respect that. In personal life, honesty and trust are extraordinarily important. My grandfather used to say when the day comes and you die, if your word wasn't any good, then neither were you. People had to know that they could count on what you had to say.