Tag Archives: clinical social work

The miracle question for policy advocates

Posted on April 19, 2012 by melindaklewis | Leave a comment

If I was a therapist, I think I’d be into solution-focused brief therapy.

OK, yes, that’s a BIG if.

Granted.

But there’s something really appealing to me, especially the “focus on strengths, and cut straight to the chase” side (which, given my aversion to process, has got to be dominant), about the idea that we don’t necessarily need to understand all of the problem in order to find some ways to make it better.

It makes intuitive sense, too, if you think about it. I mean, there’s a lot in the policy world that is still somewhat mysterious–we can’t, for example, explain everything that relates to the perpetuation of poverty. But that doesn’t mean that we haven’t found enough of what works to find some ways to make the problem better.

There’s a part of Switch that discusses the brief solution-focused approach, especially its signature (which even I remember from the one clinical class I took in graduate school): the ‘miracle’ question.

I’m sure that each practitioner has his/her slightly different take on this, but the miracle question goes something like:

“If a miracle happened and the problem was solved, what would be the first small sign you’d see that would make you think, “it’s gone!”?”

And that got me thinking:

What if we started our policy advocacy with this question?

What if, instead of thinking that we have to dissect a problem infinitely, so that we can present detailed evidence to policymakers, other advocates, and the general public (we think we have to convince everyone!) about exactly what the problem is, why it’s a problem, for whom it’s a problem, and how we know it’s a problem…

we instead started with imagining what it would be like if the problem was gone?

What if we could paint a picture for those same policymakers of the first signs of success? Not a utopian vision that no one, including us, really believes is possible, but something tangible and attainable and vivid and still…better?

Because, if I woke up tomorrow and child hunger was better, kids would get breakfast. Every day, in every house, they would get breakfast before they tried to start learning. I know my kids are ROUGH before they’ve had breakfast. And I can’t imagine sending them to school without it. What if we made sure that every kid went home the day before with breakfast for the next morning? Or that every school had breakfast programs, and kids had a way to get there? It wouldn’t mean that kids were never hungry, certainly.

It wouldn’t be Solved, with a capital “S”.

But it would be better.

What about you? What is your answer, to your miracle question? What would be the first sign you’d see that would make you notice and think…better?

And how would starting your advocacy from thinking about miracles maybe make all the difference?

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Posted in Background Reading

Tagged children, clinical social work, policy advocacy

From Narratives to Justice

Posted on February 6, 2012 by melindaklewis | Leave a comment

One of the challenges, for me at least, in teaching social policy to social work students, is finding ways to make it…real.

Compared to clients who sit across the table from us, crying or smiling (or both!), with kids hanging on their legs and hands that warmly clasp ours, policy can seem quite stale, removed, dull.

When, of course, it’s very much alive, intricately connected to everything that social workers do and, even, to the lives of those very same, very real clients.

But sometimes, even the paperwork that plagues social workers’ existences can seem more vibrant than HRsomethingorother, with abbreviations and cross-referenced statutes and presumptions galore.

And, so, I have my work cut out for me.

One of the techniques that I use, which I certainly didn’t exist, is the introduction of narratives that highlight social problems and their intrusions into people’s lives. It’s a way of bringing clients into the classroom, so that I can walk students through the root causes of the situations that entrap and stifle individuals, families, and communities. It’s especially useful in the courses I teach in the BSW program, where most of my students are not yet in practice and, so, I’m competing for attention not even against actual direct practice but against the idea of it.

A book that I’ve used pretty successfully in this venture is All Souls: A Family Story from Southie. It’s a really compelling story–I read it until early in the morning one Halloween when I was first contemplating using it in class–and the students really like it.

And, eventually, we get to the structural issues that underlie the South Boston community in which the story takes place–how poverty and unemployment make self-sufficiency out of reach, how fervent ethnic identity is forged through discrimination, and how low-income communities are exploited by those on the outside and made dumping grounds for drugs and guns that destroy those without anywhere else to go.

Reading and discussing the book puts us in another place, and sort of in someone else’s shoes, and that fosters understanding about how people react to the constraints that policies force on their lives. Which brings us to the nexus between clinical and macro practice, and to the realization that we cannot do one well without integrating the values and skills we borrow from the other. Which is exactly where I want us to be.

But it’s not always an easy journey.

Because what I’ve learned through the past 4 years of teaching is that my students are not immune to the tendency–partly human and partly a unique relic of the American orientation to the individual–to begin and end our investigation into pathology with the person living it. So when we read about Michael Patrick MacDonald’s family tragedies, my students often focus on what his mother could have done differently…or should have, instead of how much what happened to them was a product of the impact of the environment in which they were rooted–and how much that environment was shaped by the much larger economic, social, and political factors that were (are) perpetuated by those with a vested interest in their sustenance.

So, while we never ignore that individuals and families play a significant role in charting their own futures–it’s called the Person-in-Environment perspective because both parts matter–the class includes a sort of consciousness-raising process to dig towards root causes even while we also think about how we could help this particular family, if faced with them across our desks.

It’s always an experiment, how to manage class discussion and ask questions (lots and lots and lots of questions–I try not to say anything during these class sessions without a question mark!) that help my students connect what they know about the MacDonald family with what they’re learning about the macro conditions at work. I’ve also found some tactics that seem to help a bit:

I show Google maps that illustrate graphically where the MacDonald family lived, so that the students can actually see how cut off the community is from other areas, and how the physical boundaries of the social system reinforce the social ones. We also watch YouTube videos posted by community members, to get a sense of the cultural context.

I assign students to also read popular news accounts of the area, so that they have different perspectives on the same issues.

I use a variation of the Building Movement Project’s Process Guide that has students continually ask “why?” until they get to the root causes.

In direct practice, we start with stories–the stories our clients tell about themselves and their lives, and the stories that others tell about them (which are always incomplete and at least partially inaccurate). That’s where we should begin.

But we can’t end there. To really honor their stories–anyone’s stories–we must move from the individual to the societal. We must identify the ways in which context makes a difference, for better and for worse, and we must center our interventions not just on those experiencing the problems but on those responsible for them, too, however large and powerful they may be.

In doing so, we’ll create more stories, worth telling over and over again.

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Posted in Background Reading

Tagged clients, clinical social work, social justice, students, teaching

Sometimes you have to hit bottom

Posted on January 26, 2012 by melindaklewis | 2 Comments

Even though I often have to beg off when someone–hairdressers, or my kids’ teachers, or even another mom at the park–thinks that I can help with a psychological problem when I mention that I’m a social worker (I’m completely unqualified to provide counseling, and so I have to add the disclaimer, “not that kind of social worker,” and make a referral), I still think in clinical terms sometimes.

And, you know, working in public policy, and with elected officials, that’s sometimes really helpful.

Like this year, in my state legislative advocacy, I’ve been thinking a lot about psychopathology, or at least what I know of it, and about addictions and recovery.

And I’ve been thinking about the truism that, sometimes, our clients have to “hit bottom” before there’s enough incentive to change, and that crises can be powerful motivators for healing.

To me, that sounds a lot like where we are in our movement-building this year.

It’s hard to imagine things being much worse (although, just like in clinical social work, I’m hesitant to claim that they couldn’t be!): class sizes in public schools are too big, community mental health centers are turning people away, and public assistance offices are closing around the state.

We face the possibility of several lawsuits related to the actions of last year’s legislature–in the areas of reproductive rights and voting rights, most likely–and defending those will take even more money from the state’s coffers. It’s getting harder to be a student, or a woman, or an immigrant in our state, and there’s a collective sense of looking over one’s shoulder to see who will be the next target.

Except.

Just like when faced with a client whose life is crumbling around herself, I see promising signs of renewal.

I’m getting more emails from social service organizations with questions about how they can advocate. A workshop for agencies trying to transform themselves into agents for social change attracted more interest than they could accommodate. More letters to the editor decrying the program cuts are popping up in the papers. A community meeting about the closing of a local welfare office was standing-room only. Our local coalition against anti-immigrant legislation is growing statewide, with organizing cells taking off in communities large and small.

Just like someone dealing with his/her own personal demons, these first steps are only that–tentative, sometimes conflicted, often inadequate.

There will be more dark days.

But if the first step is recognizing that there’s a problem, we’re on the path to healing.

Our struggles have names, and we have a shared hope that comes from having companions on a difficult journey.

We may be at the bottom, or at least near it, but we’re not down here alone.

And if those with whom social workers have the honor to work, every day, can build from their strengths to best their own battles, then we can, too.

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Posted in Analysis and Commentary

Tagged advocacy, clinical social work, Kansas

A moment to process

Posted on April 26, 2011 by melindaklewis | Leave a comment

I don’t really know anyone who loves debriefing after an organizing or advocacy campaign.

I know I don’t.

I mean, how can rehashing what worked, and what didn’t, possibly compare with the excitement of planning your strategy, or the intensity of implementation?

But I don’t know that that’s really the point.

What I do know is that we skip over the debriefing part of the process at our own peril; that, to the long-term viability of our organizing efforts, it’s every bit as important as the other phases; and that skillfully facilitating a debriefing session is far from easy.

The best news?

Social workers are naturals at this part.

Key to a successful debriefing are some of the skills that social workers hone, both through our professional education and through our work with clients: attending to both affect and content, eliciting participation from all members, monitoring intragroup relationships, and utilizing active listening that can lead to corrective action.

I remember one debriefing session, for example, that revealed that my decision to skip one part of the agenda because we were running more than 20 minutes behind (and our guests of honor had a cross-country bus to catch!) resulted in some feelings of betrayal among some of our coalition. Some damage was done, but we were able to repair it much more quickly because we paid attention to it.

Another debriefing session discovered that my leaders thought that we weren’t aiming high enough in our legislative goals, and that they wanted to ramp up the next phase of the campaign. Without taking the time to talk through the work, I could have missed this huge step.

And, of course, I’ll never forget the coalition debriefing where one member let slip that her organization was receiving significant grant funds to support the work, while the rest of us were adding the work to our existing loads. Needless to say, some renegotiation ensued.

I’d love to hear your own stories about debriefing in advocacy, how you make it work, and what it has meant for your progress (and your process). Here are my top five debriefing tips, mostly learned the hard way:

You shouldn’t always be the facilitator: Especially if you’re the lead organizer, taking the lead on the debriefing can stifle honest discussion by maintaining the power imbalance present in the work itself. Also, facilitating debriefing sessions is an important learning activity for organizers, so giving your leaders a chance to take this on can be critical to their development.

Make it automatic: If you have to call people together for a special event, or pull people away from the next campaign, in order to conduct a debriefing, it’s less likely to happen, and less likely to have your leaders’ full attention when it does. I found that a short debriefing immediately following event (like in the bus on the way back, or on the phone that evening), followed by another brief session at the beginning of the next, regularly-scheduled meeting, often worked well. Find the schedule that works for you, but institutionalize it.

Follow through: Nothing extinguishes people’s energies like feeling that their concerns are ignored. When people raise ideas about how to improve future actions, or how to select the next target, make sure that someone is assigned to be accountable for making that happen. Or, be honest about the limitations that will make it impossible to achieve everyone’s expectations.

Transparency rules: Here, among your core leaders, you can’t afford to be anything less than totally honest. If you made certain decisions because of pressure from your organization, say so. If you sacrificed certain ideals because of lack of consensus among your leadership, talk about that. No action is ever perfect, but you can be sure that the next one will be worse if you don’t deal openly with this one’s problems. This also requires being clear about the criteria by which your work should be evaluated: are you mostly concerned with leadership development? turnout? media coverage? progress towards policy goals? Your group can decide the measuring stick by which they will be evaluated, but you need to be transparent about how you define “success.”

Be selective: A mass public meeting is not the place for a no-holds-barred debriefing. Especially in the early stages of a campaign, you don’t want to air all of your secrets in a public forum, and you can’t expect leaders to grow and take risks if they fear that they’ll be completely exposed. That’s why I like debriefing at the beginning of a planning session; those who regularly play an active role in putting together campaigns are those with the most say in how they should be shaped, and evaluated.

How do you “debrief” in macro practice? How do your social work skills come into play? What lessons would you add to the five above?

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Posted in Tips and How-Tos

Tagged clinical social work, community organizing, macro social work

Brick Walls=Policy Agendas

Posted on March 7, 2011 by melindaklewis | Leave a comment

photo from flickr creative commons

It’s an obvious obsession of mine, this question of how to help social workers in direct practice integrate policy advocacy and social change work into their busy, sometimes draining, clinical practice.

I spend a fair amount of time, not just reading and thinking about how to overcome this divide, how to build the skills, and how to create structures that support such “case-to-cause” advocacy, but also conducting trainings and presentations for social workers, working with students at all levels of social work education, and consulting with nonprofit organizations interested in involving their direct service staff in advocacy.

And then I found a statement that has such appeal, such clarity, such imagery…that I believe it has real potential to change not just how I talk about these challenges with practitioners, but, really, how we all approach them.

The idea, which I read in a report somewhere that I honestly can’t remember, but immediately scrawled on a sticky note and carried around with me, came from the Sargent Shriver National Center on Poverty Law, and goes like this:

Every time, in our work with people in need, that we encounter a brick wall, we’ve just found our policy agenda.

So, then, whether we’re working with those with mental illness, or children in poverty, or recent immigrants, or survivors of domestic violence…and whether our ‘brick wall’ is an unduly strict eligibility rule or a burdensome verification process or tragic gaps in service or discriminatory treatment…

we’ve just been shown where we need to focus our advocacy efforts, at knocking down those brick walls so that we, and our clients, can make it through to the other side.

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Posted in My New Favorite Thing

Tagged advocacy, clients, clinical social work, social workers

Termination and Community Organizing

Posted on February 7, 2011 by melindaklewis | Leave a comment

This is the first in a weeklong series, of sorts, on the “mashup” between clinical and macro practice…how social work skills translate between the two worlds, and how, sometimes, they don’t, at least not neatly.

In my opinion, the concept of termination in social work practice is presented, in academic literature and even in classrooms, as much more discrete, and definitive, than it really is, whether you’re working 1:1 with a client in clinical practice, in a therapeutic group, with a family, or, in the case of macro practitioners, with an entire community.

Especially in advocacy and community practice, saying ‘goodbye’ is often a complicated, long, incomplete, and fairly messy process, and the implications of that reality, for workers and those with whom they’re working, warrant additional attention in social work education, macro practice literature, and, I think, here, too.

First, a story of termination, from my own practice, with some lessons learned and questions raised. I really want to hear from community practitioners, too, about your own stories of saying goodbye, and moving on, in community organizing and/or advocacy work. It’s just as important, for you and for your work, as initiation.

We don’t always control the ‘goodbye’: Even when we’re the ones making the decision to leave, the overlapping communication channels and sheer size of our “client” base in community practice can mean that we lose the opportunity to handle, in the way that we deem best for those with whom we work, the mechanics of the termination. When I decided to leave my work at El Centro, Inc., far too many of my most dedicated leaders found out from someone else, both because of the time it took me to talk with everyone, and because others within the organization found out and shared the information on their own terms. That can do real damage to relationships, to your credibility, and to the commitment of those leaders for the work to come, so thinking carefully, in advance, about how to notify people is important.

Some people won’t find out: Conversely, because information travels haphazardly in any community, some people you want to know about your termination won’t, and that causes problems both emotional and logistical. I had long used the same cell phone number for work and personal use (reimbursed by the organization), but I had to disconnect it when, six months after leaving, I was still receiving calls from folks in the community who didn’t know that I was no longer organizing for El Centro. And that’s in addition to those, below, who know but pretend not to!

Breaking up is hard to do: Obviously, this is true in clinical practice, too, but the often-looser constraints on relationships for macro practitioners can mean fewer protections for both worker and client when there’s ambiguity about the termination. I still have people stop me in the grocery store to ask me about comprehensive immigration reform, more than 3 years after I left El Centro. It’s picked up, really, within the last year, since the organization can no longer afford to have a full-time advocacy/organizer staff member. On the one hand, that’s okay–part of what I had hoped to instill in the community was a right to ask questions and seek representation, but, to the extent to which it reflects an inability to connect with an organization that can give structure to their concerns and their participation, it’s a big problem. I am still very careful about which invitations I accept, how I handle my public presence, even how I negotiate boundaries with leaders with whom I had been very close for years. The whole issue of boundaries and dual relationships is complex for social workers in macro practice, and termination doesn’t render these ambiguities necessarily moot.

Social change is slow, so termination is often artificial: Even when an organizing effort has reached an interim goal, there’s always more that can/should be done, so termination in macro practice is usually externally-imposed (the worker finds a new job, the organization runs out of funding, someone new is brought in, the Board no longer supports that strategy), not the result of having naturally reached a point of stopping, or even transition (as often happens in clinical practice). We’re terminating at some point along a nearly interminable trajectory of social change, and that means that questions such as where participants should plug in now, and how the work will continue, are critical, even amidst the emotions of fracturing relationships. I remember having pizza with a group of my core leaders, all of us crying, while going over the budgets of the money that they had raised for the comprehensive immigration reform struggle, so that they could be sure that the organization would be accountable to them for the use of those funds. We had conference calls with regional and national groups to talk about the transition, as well as spending long evenings in their homes, talking about what the future might bring.

Confronting the limits of autonomy, with vultures circling: Community organizing is about helping people to claim their own power to get what they deserve and stop what they don’t want. And, yet, termination is often another lesson in the limits of that power, over the actions of another. It’s hard to tell people you’ve spent years coaching not to take “no” for an answer, well…”no”. And, when organizers and their communities have built real power, others will descend in moments of vacuum to see what they can scoop up. Groups’ ability to resist this cooptation depends, largely, on the extent to which the leadership is perceived as located within the participants/members, as opposed to the organizers. I spent a lot of time, in those past several weeks, working through plans and helping leaders process their options, including warning them about potential takeover attempts, and even role-playing how they’d handle some possible scenarios.

Reflecting on relationships: The most poignant thing about those last two months of transition, for me, were the hugs from male and female immigrant leaders, most of them parents, who hated that I was leaving and yet affirmed, with love, my decision to craft a place in the movement that would allow me more time to focus on my kids. Really, those conversations, and their reflection of the tremendous bond we had built, were the only times when I ever doubted my decision. Macro social workers might like to think that we’re more “practical”, or at least political, than our “emotional” clinically-oriented colleagues. But saying goodbye is hard on us, too. We need to have a support base in place for ourselves, including mentors with whom we can process our feelings, especially since, for many of us, our leaders have been some of our primary work relationships for years.

How have you said goodbye, in community organizing? What issues did you encounter? And what would have made it healthier? What should we teach social workers about termination in macro practice? And what do we all have to learn in practice?

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Posted in Analysis and Commentary

Tagged clinical social work, community organizing, macro practice

But Band-Aids feel good: a tale of the macro social worker and the Christmas Bureau

Posted on January 3, 2011 by melindaklewis | Leave a comment

“Muy buenos días,” I greeted the single father who had arrived at the Christmas Bureau to pick up food and clothing, and maybe a present, for his four children.

He smiled.

I walked him through the Christmas Bureau, explaining how many of each type of item he was allowed to take, translating any of the unfamiliar canned goods, and making some small talk.

I think we talked about the weather.

And then we arrived at the toy section, where he set to work picking out something for his 6-year-old daughter and 3-year-old son. He found a Matchbox car set and something Hannah Montana, pronounced them “perfecto”, and proceeded to pick out a winter coat as his own present.

Slightly ahead of us, I saw a young mom, who, with a baby strapped to her chest and a three-year-old son on her hip, exuded weariness.

She seemed nervous as her volunteer escort, who didn’t speak Spanish, showed her various present options for her son. She hesitated, looked around, and caught my eye.

Stepping away from my “client”, I whispered in her ear, “would you like me to distract your son so that the present can be a surprise, from Santa Claus?”

Grateful, she grinned and nodded, and he and I skipped off to find a lollipop while she hid his Handy Manny toy inside the towels she chose for herself.

When we got back, she whispered, “gracias”, and, Mommy to Mami, we smiled.

And those encounters, and the rest of the 15 hours that I spent at the Christmas Bureau this holiday season, giving directions in Spanish and filling out forms and searching through racks of clothing for the right sizes, did absolutely nothing to reorder the fundamentally unjust social structures in our society. No laws were changed. No wrongs were really righted.

And, yet.

It sure felt good.

I came home after every shift brimming with a sense that the world is full of love and hope, even though what I saw was so much poverty and sadness. It wasn’t the high that I felt when the Kansas Legislature passed our instate tuition policy, or when we got the appropriations for college savings funds for low-income students, or when 10,000 people showed up to protest unfair immigration policies.

But connecting with people in a very human, and intimate, way, restored my soul and lifted my spirits as crafting letters to the editor and planning rally agendas and commenting on proposed regulations does not.

And, so, as this new year begins, and as I think back on those experiences at the end of the last, I guess my thoughts are these:

I get it.

I get it about why so many social workers would rather walk people through the trials of their lives, rather than pull themselves away to challenge the social structures that set up those same trials. I get it why, when people think about volunteering, they think about tutoring and reading to people in nursing homes, not collecting petition signatures or registering voters or calling Congress.

For me, spending this time working directly with those in need is a powerful reminder of the work that remains to be done. A working father shouldn’t be without a winter coat all the way until December 10th. A young mother shouldn’t have to choose sanitary napkins as her Christmas present.

Not in a country where so many have so very much. And not when our nation depends on the work of these very families to sustain our economy.

Not as we welcome the year 2011.

So, I’m still an unapologetic, unconverted macro social worker, albeit one who relishes the chance to put Band-Aids on sometimes, because it means sharing a smile with a fellow traveler in this unfair world. But I won’t speak derisively of “just putting on Band-Aids“, because I’ve been reminded about just how needed those Band-Aids can be.

Will we really change the world by helping those left out, one at a time? Maybe not. I still don’t like the starfish story.

But there’s a little boy whose mom got to see him open a brand-new bicycle on Christmas morning, a little boy whose hope for a brighter tomorrow, and an essentially “good” world, might just stay alive for awhile longer.

And that’s not nothing.

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Posted in Background Reading

Tagged clinical social work, poverty, social change, volunteering

Why social workers should run political campaigns

Posted on October 25, 2010 by melindaklewis | 2 Comments

One of the books that got me temporarily banned from the Johnson County Library system this summer was The Political Brain, which I had waited for months to get and then couldn’t give back until I’d gotten through it. I’ve paid the fine, though, and am back in their good graces, and, more importantly, the book provided the insight for this post, which kicks off a week of election discussion here:

Social workers’ understanding of how people process emotions and make emotionally-driven decisions, combined with our commitment to seeking justice through collective action, make us uniquely qualified to shape campaigns for elective office.

I know, this sounds contradictory, given what I’ve written about social workers’ avoidance of power, but this book makes a clear case, based on analysis of political campaigns (and people’s response to them) as well as psychological and neurological research, that tapping into voters’ emotions, in a way that’s authentic, is key to winning races, and, more critically, shaping policy debates.

And social workers know feelings.

Unlike some of the unsuccessful, progressive politicians profiled in the book, social workers see every day that making a purely rational claim (“Drugs are bad for you.” “Your husband will keep battering you if you don’t leave.” “Your mother needs round-the-clock care.”) often fails to sufficiently motivate behavior.

And we understand why.

We know that change is hard and that the only thing that has the power to overcome our resistance is the activation of our strongest emotions: love, fear, hope, anger. We know that people seldom make cold calculations of “pros” and “cons” before making any of the important decisions in their lives, even when that might not be a bad idea. We know that people orient their decision making around people and that stories and relationships mobilize more than data and logic.

If we bring that understanding into political campaigns, combined with a centering core of social work values, we can help candidates to get their constituents excited about our shared vision for society: healthy kids, strong families, safe neighborhoods, good jobs, a clean environment, civil rights, and a secure future.

We can help good candidates tap into what we know people are already longing for, by reaching them first through how they’re feeling about our country, and our communities, and their lives, instead of only telling them how to think about it. Instead of competing for voters’ attention against the many other demands that naturally command more of their emotional energy (trying to “distract them” away from their children and jobs and worries with obscure-sounding policy statements), we can frame electoral questions so that they resonate with the core of people’s lives.

And we can do this using the same clinical skills that serve us so well in direct practice: understanding where people are, emotionally, in order to “meet” them there; finding, targeting, and activating people’s openness to change and points of receptivity to new information; being comfortable with emotion and all its messiness; recognizing the ambivalence that characterizes many people’s attitudes towards much of life, and figuring out how to approach issues so that people can reconcile their own internal divisions; and insisting that the most difficult issues to work through are precisely the ones that most need our attention.

Let 2012 be the year of the social worker in political campaigns: as candidates, as consultants, as strategists. We have the skill set, and we have the values, and we have the vision. We know how to use feelings to change the world.

It’s what we do.

And it’s what will win.

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Posted in Analysis and Commentary

Tagged clinical social work, elections, framing, social work

First Impressions: What social workers know that every advocate should

Posted on October 11, 2010 by melindaklewis | Leave a comment

I’ve kind of been on a Malcolm Gladwell kick the past couple of weeks. I read Blink and Outliers and Tipping Point in three successive days, so I’ve had some of his ideas stirring around in my head for awhile now. And, of course, what that means for all of you is that what’s stirring around in my head has to have somewhere to go; hence, I’ve got a few posts about Gladwell-inspired ideas.

This is the first of these, about the snap judgments, the instinctive knowledge, that Gladwell exalts in Blink. I’ve got one more variation on this theme for tomorrow, but, here, I’m thinking about those little puzzles that social workers, especially those with finely-tuned clinical skills, are so good at sorting out: the twitch in someone’s face that suggests discomfort, the flat affect that betrays happy words, the shifting eyes that tell a trained clinician to ask more questions.

We’re fairly comfortable with ambiguity, and we understand that ambivalence is an emotion as real as any other. We’re used to having to make quick decisions, with relatively little available information and, many times, no perfect option (“should this child be removed from her home?” “does this client need to be hospitalized?”). We’ve learned, then, to rely on what we can get from quick glimpses into the lives of others; in the language of Gladwell, this is “thin-slicing” at its finest.

And while those are obviously skills that are essential in the clinical realm (and skills that, quite honestly, can sometimes be problematic; Gladwell devotes many pages to dissecting prejudices and the ways in which first impressions can negatively and unduly influence our thinking about others, or even entire groups of ‘others’), they’re skills that are critically important but often underrated in the advocacy world, too.

Which brings me to today’s installment in one of my favorite all-time themes: more reasons why social workers are particularly well-suited to advocacy success. Here’s my list of 5 ways in which this thin-slicing social workers develop in the field can serve us well in advocacy.

1. Being able to “read into” a policymaker’s statements–I’ve often seen advocates who feel betrayed by what they thought they heard a policymaker say, when the reality is that they weren’t listening with an eye to all of those subtle cues.

2. Making quick decisions in negotiations–This requires not just being able to rapidly hone in on what’s really essential, but also very high emotional intelligence, to know what others are willing to give in a negotiation, and where the deal-breaker point is.

3. Noticing what’s not happening–Social workers are adept, as are experts in many fields, at noticing surprises, quirks that interrupt expected patterns and, as such, deserve our attention. In advocacy, this means seeing unique opportunities for coalitions and the ‘spaces’ that open up, often only momentarily, for movement on a given issue.

4. Forging through uncertainty–There are no foregone conclusions in advocacy work, and we have to make choices without being able to skip ahead to know how those choices will turn out. Social work advocates who are guided by an internal value system, rather than subject exclusively to the whims of external opinion, are better able to keep their faith in times of seeming bleakness.

5. Sizing up potential partners–Advocates have to know who they can trust, and also what roles different potential allies (policymakers, agency regulators, coalition partners, media outlets) can play in a given campaign, and that takes being able to assess people, relatively quickly (because you need to know how to relate to them in the meantime), and also being aware enough of the biases that shape our first impressions to know when they are not to be trusted, either. Advocates who can’t manuever these fraught situations well end up either stumbling over themselves (burning bridges as they go) or unnecessarily locked in to a narrow range of allies, stunting the progress of their struggle.

So what are your first impressions of this idea–that social workers can import into our advocacy work the “people-reading” skills that make us good social workers in the first place? How would you add to this list?

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Posted in Analysis and Commentary

Tagged advocacy, clinical social work, reviews

We need a macro/clinical mashup

Posted on May 17, 2010 by melindaklewis | Leave a comment

from rufus50, via Flickr

Social work is desperately in need of a mashup.

We need to force a collision between our two ‘worlds’, trusting that, out of the inevitable discomfort and even chaos will emerge a stronger, more dynamic, more capable profession.

I first learned about mashups in my forays into the use of emerging technologies in advocacy practice–tech geniuses who take iPhone applications and spreadsheet programs and come up with these tools that will do everything except change my kids’ diapers. (If only someone could come up with a mashup that tackles that!)

But it was Joshua Cooper Ramo’s book The Age of the Unthinkable that got me thinking about mashups outside of the technology realm. I read this book because Rosetta Thurman had a post (which I unfortunately can’t find, but I had fun browsing through her archives again!) about it being part of the assigned reading for a young nonprofit leaders conference. The crux of the book is basically how we need totally new thinking to confront the totally new challenges (with a special emphasis on terrorism and global security) that confront our world today. And he talks about the need for mashups–the collision between different tools, or ways of seeing the world–in order to build our capacity to engage and, ultimately, succeed, in this challenging environment. He convincingly makes the case that, not only are we a part of this ‘mashup world’ whether we like it or not, but that, in fact, others are using mashups effectively against our interests, so we’d better learn new thinking too.

And that’s what brought me to this clinical/macro mashup idea. I mean, if you think about it, the explosion of nonprofit management specializations within MBA programs is a kind of mashup: business school preparation+charitable/social justice ideals. And social work is seeing the impact of that adaptation in our professional schools and in the organizations where we practice.

We know that what makes social work awesome, as a profession, is our simultaneous commitment to social justice and pursuit of excellent skills in working with people. It’s what has set us apart for more than a century.

But this is a new age, and we need new tools. So, if, as Ramo details, a video game controller and air-bag technology can be mashed up into the Wii, revolutionizing an industry and making billions of dollars…then can’t we, as a profession, bring together all that we know how to do so well in an innovative and transformational way?

YES.

And, in fact, we must, not only for our own survival, but because our world demands everything that we have to offer: our interpersonal skills and our ability to change systems in pursuit of social justice.

So what would this mashup require? And what would it look like?

To begin, we need to rethink how we divide ourselves, reforming social work education to bring macro and clinical content into every course. We need to reshape social work licensure and continuing education to institutionalize this cohesion, and we need to advocate for ourselves as a profession, articulating what it is that we bring to organizations and changing job descriptions to encompass our full capacity. We need new scholarship to develop theories of social change that highlight the role of clinical interventions and provide resources for social work educators to integrate radical social work content into the classroom. We need practicum opportunities that meld macro experiences with clinical encounters, and we need support for all social work agencies to enhance their social change/macro practice endeavors.

The result, I truly believe, would be liberating for individual social work practitioners, freed to live their values and do what most social workers love most–working with people–in an environment that fully supports a vision of social justice to which all social workers aspire. For our profession, it would be reinvigorating, helping us to regain our sense of identity and addressing many of our insecurities about our niche in the world. And for those we serve, it could be transformational, as they work collaboratively with clinicians who are keenly attuned to social injustice and committed to structural change, and encounter social work policy analysts and administrators who remain rooted in the values and ethics of social work practice.

As Ramo emphasizes in his discussions of other kinds of mashups, we shouldn’t pretend that this will be painless. The idea of a mashup is to bring two admittedly different things together in a novel way to create something unique, larger and distinct from the sum of the two parts. And that doesn’t happen without a fairly dramatic clash, even a crash.

But that’s precisely wherein lies the revolutionary potential of a mashup. The kind that can change videogaming from a hobby primarily of adolescent males to a social activity that stretches across demographic strata (not into my living room, maybe, but, still…).

The kind that can change lives. The kind we need.

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Posted in Background Reading

Tagged clinical social work, radical social work, social workers

Tag Archives: clinical social work

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