Fueling advocacy through scholarship
Alumna establishes fund for future social work leaders
Margaret Kennedy (SAS ’78) has spent more than 50 years advocating for mental health, guided by a principled belief in doing “what is right.”
It’s what led her to study at ӰƵ’s Jack, Joseph and Morton Mandel School of Applied Social Sciences in the 1970s, and today, it’s what motivates her to give back. She established the Margaret M. Kennedy Scholarship Fund in 2022 and continues to add to it, including with a new commitment earlier this year.
“My goal is to support students the same way I was supported,” she said. “We need social workers—we need advocates—now more than ever.”
Kennedy was working in child protection and community mental health in Wytheville, Virginia, when her supervisor and mentor encouraged her to advance her education. She applied to what is now the Mandel School and was accepted with full financial aid.
The alumna credits the Mandel School with laying the foundation for a career that has taken her across the United States and Canada in key leadership positions, including serving as the first provincial director of mental health and addiction services in Prince Edward Island and later as interim associate director for addiction and mental health in Ontario.
“[My education] impressed employers,” she reflected, “and gave me strategic, fiscal and supervisory skills I’ve used ever since.”
It also afforded her the opportunity to teach at three universities during her career, including a period at CWRU. Kennedy returned to the Mandel School in the mid-1980s to direct a statewide training project for human services staff and lead the intensive semester program. It was during that time she met her now husband, David Pedlar, PhD (GRS ’97, social welfare), whose research in gerontology and veteran health has taken him around the world.
“Social workers make uniquely strong leaders because of their ability to see beyond disciplinary boundaries,” said Pedlar, a senior scientist at the University of Ottawa’s Institute for Mental Health Research. “Margaret’s career is a great example of that—and the Mandel School was like gas in the tank.”
Today, the couple lives in Kingston, Ontario, where Kennedy is making her second attempt at retirement—though her passion for social work has kept her active as a volunteer with a local intimate partner violence organization and a member of the Mandel School Alumni Board.
Learn more about Kennedy in this 2024 episode of the Mandel School's podcast, Change Leaders.
