From the health educator promoting health education in the community to the social worker ensuring foster kids are well taken off, human services involve offering services to people in need. If you have a passion for helping individuals at a personal level and improving their lives, then you may want to consider a degree in human service. These are courses that focus on helping disadvantaged members of society.
The good thing is that there are many institutions offering such courses, giving you plenty of options. In addition, physical location should not be a barrier. You can take an online degree in human services and still use it to help your community. Take a look at what you can do with this degree.
Mental Health Aide
Now more than ever, mental health has become such an important issue to talk about. Unlike in the past, mental health issues can no longer be swiped under the rug. A mental health aide, also referred to as a behavioral health aide or mental health technician, can help with this in various settings. This can be in mental health facilities, hospitals, and treatment programs.
Your role involves monitoring patient behavior and activities and reacting accordingly. You may also have to accompany patients when they go for appointments, tests, and treatments. Seeing as you will be helping patients resolve psychological issues, you will need to have or learn listening and interpersonal skills and also have a caring personality.
Community Service Manager
Being a community service manager comes with performing managerial duties as this is an administrative role. Part of this job involves supervising community programs that support the well-being of individuals. You can choose to work with the community as a whole or a specific demographic such as the homeless, veterans, children, or older adults. You can also focus on helping people with specific challenges such as chronic hunger, substance abuse, or mental health needs.
You will often be required to evaluate how impactful the program you are in charge of is and report back to the founder or administrators. Although the specific duties of community managers will vary from organization to organization, most of them are in charge of hiring and training new staff members.
Community Health Worker
Community health workers (CHW) are community lay members who partner with local health systems in rural and urban environments. CHWs often share language, life experiences, ethnicity, and socioeconomic status with the community members they are serving. Because they reside in the communities they are serving, they have the ability to offer the right information where it is needed. They can get to community members where they live, play, eat, school, or even worship.
In other words, they are agents of change when it comes to reducing health imbalances in underserved communities.
Child Advocate
Did you know that about 300 million kids between the age of 2 to 4 suffer some form of abuse? This can be psychological or physical. In a bid to find justice for victims of child abuse, several organizations will be involved in the arrest, investigation, and prosecution of the alleged offender. This whole process involves the victim having to testify, which can be traumatic. As a way to help reduce the trauma, judges will appoint a child advocate to facilitate the safety of the child.
Generally, a child advocate is in charge of promoting and protecting the rights of children. Besides the court setting, child advocates can also work in other areas such as arranging adoptions, foster care placement, helping teens struggling with drugs, committing crimes, and facing homelessness.
Substance Abuse And Behavioral Disorder Counselor
If you have always wanted to help people struggling with mental health conditions, drug addiction, alcoholism, eating disorders, and other behavioral problems, a degree in human services can be your ticket there. Your role will be to provide support and treatment to individuals struggling with the mentioned issues. As a counselor, you can act as a guiding force to patients in the process of integrating them back into society where their behavior has left a destructive trail.
Part of this process involves consulting with friends and families of the patient to find the right treatment. Beyond offering your services to substance abuse or behavioral disorder victims, you can also run outreach programs to create awareness of these conditions and how society can help in general.
Probation Officer
Probation officers have a duty of preserving public safety while also supporting the rehabilitation of offenders. Their work in the legal system involves managing probationers while they are serving part of their sentence. It is a good field for anyone wishing to make an impact in society or on other people. Probation officers help in the rehabilitation of individuals in custody, parole, or probation. They also offer different social services, such as career training, educational resources, and supporting individuals struggling with drug and alcohol abuse.
These are just some of the major roles you may have to choose from if you do a degree in health and human services. People who choose careers in human services are interested in making other people’s lives safer, better, and easier. And in an age where a lot of humans need care and assistance, this field is the right choice to make the world better.
