Step Up and Run: Social Work in the Senate

Former Senator Susan Eggman’s path to the legislature runs through a hospice bedside, a social work classroom, and a family history she couldn’t set aside. She grew up watching a family member with bipolar disorder, lost a high school sweetheart to suicide, and heard her teenage daughter ask why we couldn’t help the people in the street.

In this conversation, she names the laws she is proudest of from her time in office: the 2015 End of Life Option Act, a rewrite of the conservatorship standard, and the Behavioral Health Services Act (BHSA). She explains that the old Mental Health Services Act had no money for housing or infrastructure and little accountability for outcomes, and the BHSA shifted funds toward the sickest of the sick. When she first started on this work, she says she couldn’t get a committee hearing, yet later she won nearly unanimous bipartisan support for her behavioral health legislation by building relationships and telling stories her colleagues recognized from their own constituents.

Now chair of the School of Social Work at Sacramento State University, she makes the case that social workers, trained to see every level of a system, belong in elected office and encourages her students to run.