Wednesday, October 02, 2024

Every year, Beech Brook awards the Suzanne Brookhart Harrison Award for Exceptional Service to Children – our top honor – to a standout professional in our field, someone who has been able to make a positive impact on children and families. In 2024, Beech Brook presented this award to Dr. Jennifer Bartholomew, Director of Community Programs at Partnership for a Safer Cleveland.

Jenni’s passion and expertise lies in the macro – or big picture – level of social work. Advocacy, policy, and research all help create a comprehensive understanding of social problems impacting our communities and help determine how to address these issues. In other words, Dr. Bartholomew has spent her career advocating for children and families by bringing community organizations together to collectively solve societal problems, because that’s the only way to make a real, lasting impact on communities.

Jenni’s career in social work began in 2001 after replying to a classified ad that simply said, “Do you want to help your community?” Curious enough to respond, Jenni found herself working at United Way of Central New York where she spent nine years evaluating outcomes and public responses to community improvement projects through United Way’s Community Impact Division. This experience led her to pursue her master’s degree in social work so that she could help address the needs of people in crisis.

Rather than becoming a social worker working with individual clients, Jenni decided to focus on overall community systems improvement and earned her doctorate in Social Welfare at Case Western Reserve University. It was through her work at Case that Jenni met Dr. Mark Singer, a professor and longtime Beech Brook board member.

While working with Dr. Singer, Jenni focused on police/community relations and played an integral role in the implementation of Beech Brook’s Police-Assisted Referral [PAR] program, which is a partnership between the Cleveland Metropolitan Housing Authority Police Department and others, and is the first of its kind in the United States. Jenni helped secure funding and created buy-in for this new way of policing within the community and continues to support PAR in her role at Partnership for a Safer Cleveland.

By connecting the public, community organizations, and policymakers to address societal problems collaboratively, Dr. Jennifer Bartholomew continues to the answer the call from the United Way classified newspaper ad asking if she wants to help her community – the answer has always been a resounding "yes."