#MacroSW: Harnessing Power Through Social Action in Social Work

by Rachel L. West, MSW

This article is based on a #MacroSW Twitter chat series on social action in social work. #MacroSW Twitter chats are held every Thursday night at 9 p.m. Eastern. For more information, check out https://macrosw.com. The New Social Worker is a #MacroSW media partner.

     Social action harnesses collective power to leverage positive change for communities. The goal of the Social Action Model is to redistribute power and resources, expand democracy, and create a just and equitable society. This model presupposes that there are disadvantaged and oppressed communities that need to be organized.

    Key theories of the social action model include empowerment theory, ecosystem, social support, and social network perspectives. An important feature of social action is the involvement of the community throughout the process.

    #MacroSW has been presenting a social action series since 2017. To date, topics have included community assessment, action planning, and radical community organizing. Over the course of presenting and attending #MacroSW Twitter chats, I noticed that there were many participants who didn’t know where to start when it came to organized change on a macro level. They were aware of problems communities were experiencing, but they didn’t have the knowledge and skills pertaining to action planning and mobilization.  

    This isn’t surprising, considering the lack of emphasis placed on macro curriculum in social work programs. Education for Macro Intervention: A Survey of Problems and Prospects (Rothman, 2013) highlights concerns about the state of macro practice in social work education. The concerns raised included:

• lack of interest or opposition by faculty to macro courses and programs
• little to no hiring of macro faculty
• school curriculums that are primarily clinical

    The intent of the social action series is to provide participants with resources and information about social action and community organizing that they can apply in social work practice. Experienced community organizers often participate in the chats. They offer additional insight into the matter by sharing resources and experiences.

Social Action Chat Series

    The first chat in the social action series, Social Action 101: Vision, focused on defining community and writing a personal and shared vision for the community. It should be noted that I approach these chats from the perspective that the social workers/community organizers doing this work are themselves members of the community in question.

    Your personal vision for the community is your ideal picture of how things should be. An exercise I suggest is: Sit down with a blank piece of paper and a pen. Think about the communities that you are a member of. Choose one community to focus on. When you think about the community, what issues exist? What resources are present or lacking? What concerns do you have or have heard expressed by others in the community? What positive changes would you like to make? The responses to these questions will help you to come up with an ideal picture for the community.

    Once you have a personal vision, you want to go about turning it into a shared vision. No one person is the community, so you want to get input from as many community members as possible. Start by sharing your vision with other community members. Get feedback from them, and listen to their concerns and hopes for the community. At this point, you need to be open-minded and willing to change the vision to incorporate ideas from other members.

    Social Action 102: Community Assessment provided an overview of carrying out a community assessment. A community assessment provides additional insight into the community and the issues the community faces. Before diving into one, you should check to see whether there is an existing one that has been done within the past 5-10 years.

    A community assessment includes a description of the community, definition of the issues the community is facing, identification of key influencers in the community, and decision makers who have the ability to make necessary changes. It’s important to get the community’s feedback, and this can be done in a number of ways.

    Social Action 103: Action Planning dealt with writing an action plan. The community assessment helps to identify and define problems. It should shed light on how the community at large views those problems and which ones they consider most important. The next step is coming up with an action plan that will resolve the identified problems.

    You can find an action plan template at: http://www.politicalsocialworker.org/social-action-planning/

    The action plan includes long-term and short-term goals and objectives, a description of barriers, identification of stakeholders, a timeframe, actions to be taken, and tactics that will be employed.

    Social Action 104: Intro to Community Organizing introduced community organizing practice, including the role of the social worker as community organizer. The chat gave an overview of four types of community organizing:

• locality development
• social planning and policy change
• social action and systems advocacy
• coalition building

    The most recent installment of the series, Social Action 105: Radical Community Organizing, focused on the features of and theories that undergird radical organizing.

    Weill, Reisch, and Ohmer (2013) defined radical community organizing as a:

form of community practice that encompasses a dynamic set of theories, goals, ideologies, values, strategies, and tactics that seek to achieve a more egalitarian, open, and socially just world through the creation of fundamental structural, institutional, ideological, attitudinal, and behavioral changes in communities, societies and individuals. (p. 362)

    Distinguishing features of radical community organizing are:

• analysis of root causes of inequality, injustice, and oppression
• alternatives to institutions
• actions that promote structural and institutional change

Why Social Action Matters

    As mentioned, social work education has moved away from macro practice. Given current events in the United States and globally, it is imperative that social work reconnects with macro practice and engagement in social action.

    Our profession’s code of ethics calls upon us to be involved in advocating for change that benefits society as a whole. The NASW Code of Ethics (2018) states:

The primary mission of the social work profession is to enhance human well-being and help meet the basic human needs of all people, with particular attention to the needs and empowerment of people who are vulnerable, oppressed, and living in poverty. A historic and defining feature of social work is the profession’s focus on individual well-being in a social context and the well-being of society. Fundamental to social work is attention to the environmental forces that create, contribute to, and address problems in living.

    In December 2017, The United Nations Human Rights Office of the High Commissioner released a devastating report by Professor Philip Alston. Professor Alston spent two weeks traveling through the United States and talking with homeless people and those living in poverty, as well as elected officials and political appointees. The mission of the visit was to investigate whether extreme poverty was undermining the human rights of U.S. citizens. What Professor Alston encountered was a country with extreme income inequality:

The United States is one of the world’s richest, most powerful and technologically innovative countries; but neither its wealth nor its power nor its technology is being harnessed to address the situation in which 40 million people continue to live in poverty.

    Some of the issues the report touches on are:

• Health. We are living shorter and sicker lives. The infant mortality rate is steadily increasing, and people are living with untreated diseases. It is believed that as many as 12 million Americans are living with a parasitic infection (Alston, 2017).
• Voting. Our voter turnout rate is well below the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development average of 75%. Only 55.7% of the voting population showed up to the polls in the 2016 presidential election. Only 64% of the U.S. population was registered to vote in 2016. This is a startling fact, especially when compared to other democratic countries such as Canada, where 91% of the population is registered to vote (Alston, 2017).
• Poverty. Out of the six richest countries, our child poverty rate is the highest. There are 13.3 million children in the U.S. living in poverty (Alston, 2017).

    These are all issues that are of concern to social workers. While many will work directly with those affected, these issues need to be confronted on a macro level. Alston’s report mentions a number of actions that can be taken to address economic and social inequality.

    Given the current political climate, social workers need to be able to work with oppressed communities to create change that ends social injustice and inequity. Social workers cannot be afraid to get involved in the political and policy process.

References

Alston, P. (2017, December 15). Statement on Visit to the USA, by Professor Philip Alston, United Nations Special Rapporteur on extreme poverty and human rights. Retrieved from https://www.ohchr.org/EN/NewsEvents/Pages/DisplayNews.aspx?NewsID=22533&LangID=E

NASW. (2018). Code of ethics. Retrieved from https://www.socialworkers.org/About/Ethics/Code-of-Ethics/Code-of-Ethics-English

Rothman, J. (2013, June). Education for macro intervention: A survey of problems and prospects. Retrieved from https://www.acosa.org/joomla/pdf/RothmanReportRevisedJune2013.pdf

Weill, M., Reisch, M., & Ohmer, M. L. (2013). The handbook of community practice. (2nd ed.). Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.

Rachel L. West, LMSW, is an advocacy and community outreach consultant based in New York. She is a co-founder of #MacroSW Twitter chats and holds a BA in history from SUNY Stony Brook and an MSW from Adelphi University.