Mena daSilva-Clark, Longtime BUSSW Administrator, “Tapped” into BU Scarlet Key Honorary Society
The Scarlet Key honorary society at BU acknowledges alumni and non-alumni for their overall excellence and dedication to Boston University. Longtime senior administrator and assistant dean of Online and Off-Campus Programs at BU School of Social Work (BUSSW), Mena daSilva-Clark, will be “tapped” into the prestigious community this fall, followed by a formal induction ceremony during Commencement Weekend in May 2025.
DaSilva-Clark retired in January 2023 after dedicating nearly 40 years to the top-ranked school of social work. During her time at BUSSW, she made far-reaching contributions to the school and university, and to the national social work community and social work education at large.
Her nominator, BUSSW Clinical Professor Emerita Betty J. Ruth, a Scarlet Key award recipient and inductee in 2014, writes, “It is hard to overstate the profound impact made by our former colleague [Mena daSilva-Clark] on the intellectual and personal development of hundreds of BUSSW graduates.”
During her storied career at BUSSW, DaSilva-Clark led off-campus programs in four locations throughout the state, helping to establish a new program on Cape Cod and refine programs in Fall River and Worcester, and became the assistant dean of off-campus programs in 2005. She was known for saying that the off-campus programs provided “MSW education in the community, for the community.”
“DaSilva-Clark recognized the importance of reaching communities with unmet social work needs outside of Boston and worked hard to expand BU’s reach in those areas,” said Ruth. “She shaped the MSW program’s [off-campus] infrastructure to meet the needs of its adult students who often worked full-time, producing a successful stream of BU MSW graduates in northeastern Massachusetts year after year, and made sure that the program had the same top-tier faculty and quality of education as the school’s hallmark on-campus program.”
Buoyed by her rich personal relationships with colleagues and support of their teaching needs, daSilva-Clark recruited faculty from the Charles River Campus to teach her off-campus students. Her efforts, Ruth says, enabled many students who could not otherwise attend graduate school to complete a high-quality MSW program.
She was also deeply committed to meeting the needs of students who, like herself, came from underrepresented groups. Many of her students, Ruth notes, were first-generation students, students from working-class backgrounds and communities of color; immigrants and ESL speakers; or single parents working full-time.
As digital education began to emerge more prominently within higher education in the early 2000s, daSilva-Clark was charged with helping to develop a national online MSW program. The resulting BUSSW Online Program was one of the first in the nation by a highly ranked school of social work and she was subsequently appointed assistant dean of online and off-campus programs.
In addition to her administrative leadership, daSilva-Clark was a clinical assistant professor at the school and guided the development of courses related to addictions, aging, child welfare, ethics, and more – off-campus and later online. She also fostered ongoing quality improvement in existing courses and mentored dozens of social work educators in teaching them.
Ruth says, “BUSSW’s online program has been a success on every level, bringing much needed funds and students into the BUSSW orbit, while providing top notch BU MSW education to students across the country. At every step of the way, Mena kept a keen eye trained on the student experience and focused on quality education and personal experience.” She also led her team in ongoing reviews of their work which they presented to great acclaim at national social work conferences.
DaSilva-Clark also received the BU Alumni Association’s Outstanding Contribution to the School of Social Work award.
A ceremonial Tapping of the Class of 2025 Scarlet Key Candidates will take place on Sunday, September 29 at the Center for Computing and Data Science (665 Commonwealth Ave, 17th Floor) as part of BU Alumni Weekend.
The formal induction into Scarlet Key will take place Thursday, May 15, 2025 as part of the festivities for commencement week.
You can learn more about the Scarlet Key Honor Society here.