Jon Matsuoka, PhD ’85 Jon Matsuoka was raised in South Los Angeles in the 1960s, “a good place to grow up in terms of political sensibilities,” he says. His grandparents, small-business owners, immigrated to the United States from Japan around the turn of 20th century and were sent to internment camps during World War II. He believes that the civil rights progress made by his own generation shaped his interests in social work and social justice. As an undergraduate at Humboldt State University in northern California, Matsuoka first majored in wildlife biology. He soon got “caught up in the times,” switched to social work, and through involvement with various student associations “helped create a lot of awareness on campus.” Later, Matsuoka earned a master’s in social work from the University of Washington in Seattle. He continued on to the University of Michigan, earning an MA in psychology and a PhD in social work and psychology. “My interests ran the gamut from micro to macro,” Matsuoka says. Thus, he found himself doing clinical practice while writing a dissertation on settlement and adaptation of Southeast Asian refugees in the United States.
When Matsuoka was offered a position at the University of Hawai’i right out of his doctoral program, faculty at U-M SSW, such as Richard English, helped him recognize that the opportunity was a great starting point for his work. Matsuoka has been in Hawai’i ever since. In his 25 years at the University of Hawai’i, Matsuoka specialized in studying the social impact of development on native Hawaiians. This work led to his current position as president and CEO of Consuelo Foundation, an organization with which he formed a close association during his tenure as dean at the university. The foundation’s stated goal is “to eliminate abuse, neglect, and exploitation of children, women, and families in the Philippines and Hawai’i.” His two main interests at the foundation are program sustainability and reproductive health. He has recently been promoting aquaponics as a means of feeding homeless children. Aquaponics combines the sustainable production of both fish and vegetables. “If you can’t feed people, if you can’t address rates of population growth,” Matsuoka says, “nothing else will make much of a difference.”
Jon Matsuoka
When asked about the future of social work, Matsuoka says, “Students of society have to be global citizens.” He also mentions the importance of developing culturebased theoretical and conceptual skills at the same time, “things you derive from a PhD at the University of Michigan and that stay with you through your career.” —Jane Martin is a freelance writer living in Montréal.
accreditation office and says, “I was able to become very involved in assisting the development of undergrad social work education in the U.S., complete with directly assisting in the design and implementation of a formal accreditation process.” From 1986 to 1988 he rejoined the CSWE standards and accreditation staff, now in Washington, D.C. Spores also served on the CSWE board of directors and the Commission on Accreditation. Spores finished his U-M doctoral dissertation and defense—blending social work, sociology, and Southeast Asian studies—in 1976. In 1983–84, he took his first trip to Malaysia, as a Fulbright professor to the Universiti Sains Malaysia. He calls it “another major career juncture,” and adds, “[It] set into motion continuing work with this university right up to the present, [and] I met, very briefly, the
Malay woman, Sharifah Saharbi Syed Ahmad, who would become my wife 16 years later in 2000.” Regarding the changes in the field of social work, Spores says, “We must be more attentive to our changing world, with its major economic and demographic changes. Aging populations and large numbers of migrants and refugees worldwide demand our attention. We must be more fully responsive to these changes.” —Hillary Whitcomb Jesse is a freelance editor and writer living in Ypsilanti.
Ongoing Winter/Spring 2011
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