Not Your Mother’s Social Work
by Elizabeth J. Clark, PhD, MSW, MPH
This year's theme for social work month is "Social Workers - Generations Strong," and it is a good time to think about our past and how the current generation will shape the future.
Let me start with a personal memory. One of the great privileges of my professional career was attending two "listening conferences" that NASW held more than 20 years ago. The intent was to better understand how social work was developed from post WWII to the end of the last century. Twelve social work pioneers from various areas of practice agreed to speak about their own social work careers. Pioneers such as Del Anderson, Ken Carpenter, Jack Hansen, Jesse Harris, Bernice Harper, Betsy Vourlekis, and others related their personal experiences of how they worked to make certain the profession of social work thrived in the '50s, '60s, '70s, '80s, and beyond. They spoke about working to get social work established in VA hospitals, how they assisted in the Civil Rights movement and the Great Society initiative, as well as how they got social work included in the Medicare hospice benefit. Social work clinicians, educators, researchers, and policy experts came together to advance the profession. They were a unified force to be reckoned with.
As I sat through the presentations, I kept wondering if we social workers today could do what these pioneers did before us. Did we have their foresight and dedication, their organization and practice skills? In 20 or 30 or 40 years, will young social workers realize what social workers accomplished in the early decades of the 21st century to ensure the profession existed and flourished for the next 50 years?
It is a different time and place, and social work practice has had to keep pace. It is not just the impact of technology - even though that has accelerated change in major ways. New science is a factor, too. Every year, we learn more about areas like brain function, genetics and hereditary conditions, addictions, and the lifelong impact of trauma. There are also medical advances and new treatments. These discoveries can be an asset for clinical practice. They also require a broader knowledge base.
The basics and core values of social work remain unchallenged - our commitment to service and social justice, the belief in human dignity and the importance of human relationships, as well as integrity and competence. But practice areas and clinical skills have expanded. Among the more standard and usual areas of practice, there is now global social work, police social work, financial social work, library social work, veterinary social work, and travel social work, to name only a few. (See Grobman, L., ed., Days in the Lives of Social Workers, 2019, for an expanded discussion of practice areas.)
Close to 50 years ago, Alfred Kahn, in his preface to the book Shaping The New Social Work, asserted that social work practice answers the call of its time. Can we today ensure a profession appropriate to our times and to the future? I feel confident that we can.
No, it's not your mother's (or your grandmother's) social work. It is uniquely the social work profession of the current and future generation of social workers who are willing to stretch professional boundaries and find new ways of meeting the needs of others.
The course of the profession does not depend on the decisions and actions of others. As Dr. Dorothy I. Height, a famous social worker of a much earlier generation, once said, "We hold in our hands the power...to shape not only our own, but the nation's future."
As a profession, we are generations strong and growing stronger still with each generation.
References
Grobman, L. M. (ed.). (2019). Days in the lives of social workers, 5th ed. The New Social Worker Press.
Kahn, A. J. (1973). Shaping the new social work. Columbia University Press.
Elizabeth J. Clark, Ph.D., MSW, MPH, is the President of the Start Smart Career Center and former CEO of the National Association of Social Workers. Her clinical background is in oncology with an emphasis on hope, hospice, loss, and grief. She recently published Choose Hope (Always Choose Hope), and daily messages of hope can be found at #alwayschoosehope.