Alford honored as an NASW Social Work Pioneer

The National Association of Social Workers (NASW) has named Keith A. Alford, dean of the School of Social Work, an NASW Social Work Pioneer, one of the profession’s highest honors.

The NASW Social Work Pioneers® program honors social workers who have enriched their profession and improved social and human conditions through their dedication, commitment and determination.

Alford will be inducted as a Pioneer at the NASW National Conference in June 2026 in Washington, D.C.

“I am deeply grateful for this recognition,” Alford says. “As social workers, we know our mission is to uplift others and to continually strive toward improving the human condition. This honor renews my resolve to stay the course. Our work is never finished and our determination must remain steadfast.”

As a young man in South Carolina, Alford was inspired to pursue a social work career, focused on social and racial justice, by Whitney M. Young Jr., a social worker and adviser to multiple U.S. presidents, and Dorothy Height, a prominent civil rights activist. Since then, he has devoted his professional life to serving and researching the needs of children and families. His life’s work reflects his commitment to social work values and to diversity, equity, inclusion and accessibility.

Since being appointed dean of the School of Social Work in 2021, Alford has led the school through a period of continued growth and stability.

Central to Alford’s leadership philosophy is, as he puts it, the idea that, “To be trauma-informed, one has to be racially informed.” Following the racially motivated mass shooting in Buffalo on May 14, 2022, Alford facilitated programs that allowed students, faculty, staff and community members to engage in meaningful dialogue. To mark the massacre’s one-year anniversary, he led the coordination of an online seminar on Black racial trauma, providing space for attendees to grieve and reflect. Now, Alford is steering the integration of racial trauma into the school’s established trauma-informed and human rights framework.

In his research, Alford studies culturally specific service delivery for special populations, family mental health, rites of passage programming for adolescent African American males, kinship care and child welfare interventions.

His work has appeared in numerous social work journals and has been supported by grants from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Administration for Children and Families, New York State Office of Mental Health, U.S. Defense Intelligence Agency and the Gifford Foundation. Notably, he was part of a national Intelligence Community Center for Academic Excellence to enhance diversity in the intelligence field and was a co-investigator on a project funded by the National Science Foundation to support the training of diverse undergraduates in conducting trauma research with veterans.