Tag Archives: social work

The future of our female-dominated profession

Posted on August 31, 2010 by melindaklewis| 12 Comments

One of those women I can't imagine our profession without--Bertha Capen Reynolds

As you’ve probably guessed, I don’t mind controversy.

In fact, some of my favorite stories are about when I had to do a talk radio show ON MY BIRTHDAY (a Saturday, no less!), and the host had people call in to say whether I was “the stupidest person who’s ever been on the show” for advocating drivers’ licenses for undocumented immigrants; or the time I was kicked out of a church for trying to mobilize immigrant parishioners; or the time my own grandmother called me to tell me I’d been horribly misquoted in the paper, and I had to admit that I’d actually said those things.

And this post might rank up there with those.

So let me just say, first, what’s true, that some of the brightest, most passionate, most talented people I know are social workers. It is obviously my career choice, and I have never doubted for a moment that I made the right one. Period.

Something that I read about teachers in Super Freakonomics has got me thinking, though, about the nature of our profession, overwhelmingly female, and its future in the face of ever-changing gender dynamics.

We know that teaching and social work are both dominated by women. And we know that, for generations in this country (and others) they were two of only a handful of career options open to women in any meaningful numbers. Nothing shattering there. But what those freaky-economists have found is that overall teacher aptitude, measured by teachers’ score on intelligence tests and skill measures, have been falling since 1960, paralleling…the rise in occupational alternatives for women. Of course, the authors are quick to point out, this correlation is abetted by the low wages within teaching and the comparative attractiveness, then, of other professional choices–it’s not, in other words, that the brightest women no longer want to teach but, simply, now that they CAN do other things, many of which pay more and offer more rewards and fewer headaches, many do.

Which is what has me thinking about we social workers. I mean, who’s to say that Jane Addams would have chosen social work if other avenues would have been just as open to her? We can hope, but hope won’t get us the talented social workers, women and men, that we, and, more importantly, our clients, so deserve.

The answer, obviously (I trust!), is not to restrict the career options of women so that they’ll have to be social workers. But we do need to acknowledge, albeit perhaps belatedly, that the pipeline of bright women no longer heads straight to our doors, which means that we’ve got work to do.

  • We need to be serious about our professional image as a profession of choice, not of refuge. This means high standards for admission into our professional schools, based not just on academic qualifications (although they can’t be overlooked) but also engagement in the world and commitment to our profession’s values and ethics.
  • We need to work at the system level to raise salaries for qualified social workers–articulating the clear value of what we do, fighting for equitable funding for social services, and rigorously evaluating our impact.
  • We need to recruit, hard, among the target populations we hope will choose social work–not just the women who have been our profession’s backbone and guiding inspiration, but people of color, first-generation college students, rural residents, GLBT individuals, non-traditional students… If we can’t make the case as to why people should choose social work, then we can’t be surprised if they don’t.
  • We must break down barriers that make other professions more attractive routes to helping people than social work. I don’t have an exhaustive list of ideas here, but I know that it needs to include loan forgiveness for work with underserved communities and mentoring for new professionals, because we, like teachers, tend to lose some of our best folks early in their careers.

    I don’t think we have a crisis of unqualified social workers. Every semester, I’m a little bit amazed by some of the very smart, intellectually curious, naturally empathic, all-around wonderful people who have chosen to cast their lots with us. Amazed, delighted, and reassured.

    But I do think that a profession with a value base that compels us to advocate for the advancement of the less powerful, including women, must be planning for how we’ll fare in the very future we’re seeking to create–one where women have the same set of career options and incentives that men do, and where we’ll have to compete with all sectors of the economy for the best and brightest of both genders, in order to staff our profession with the hearts and minds we’ll need to tackle that next set of injustices, just beyond the horizon.

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    Social workers as policymakers

    Posted on August 20, 2010 by melindaklewis| 21 Comments

    Social workers are not, as a general rule, very comfortable with power.

    Listen to a group of social workers, or social work students, talking amongst themselves for any period of time, and this will usually become quite apparent. “You know, I wanted to make the big bucks; that’s why I became a social worker!” (facetiously, of course) “They don’t tell me anything; I’m just the social worker!” You get the idea.

    The reality, of course, is not only that such self-effacing attitudes are quite self-defeating (more on this later, since I just realized I’ve never written up my whole “power speech” for students!), but also inaccurate.

    Social workers have tremendous power. Ask any client who has ever been rejected for services, been made to feel ‘less than’, had her children removed from her home, been required to attend condescending classes, or been scheduled for an appointment at a terribly inconvenient time.

    In fact, every day in many ways large and small, WE are what our clients most directly experience as power, and as policy.

    And when we deny this, or when we fail to recognize it, we don’t win any points for our martyrdom. We don’t empower anyone by pretending that we have less power than we do. When we fail to adequately account for and ethically employ the power we have, we, instead, fail our profession, our institutions, and, most importantly, those we serve.

    This is an often uncomfortable realization for social work students who, after all, got into this business to help people, not to wield power over them. But power, and the way that power works in relationships, is really at the heart of any clinical relationship–how would we, as social workers, ever help anyone to change his/her life if not for the power granted to us by virtue of that mutual relationship? And it’s an integral part of administrative and advocacy practice, too, particularly when it comes to the discretion that social workers at all levels enjoy–to apply eligibility rules, to interpret ambiguous rules, to selectively apply certain incentives or sanctions. The literature and history of our profession recognize this–skim any introductory social work text for “social control and social assistance”–and we know that, if we were honest, our job descriptions would also include words like “gatekeeper”, “rule-maker”, and “policy police”.

    This discretion is a core part of what what makes social workers (and other, similar professions) professionals, and it’s a big part of what makes social work a feasible proposition. Think about it: there is no way that an organization could create policies to account for every possibility, and there are dozens of ways, every day, in which policies as enacted are unworkable as implemented.

    The challenge for social workers, then, is to acknowledge the policies we make through our decisions, and through our inaction, too. It is to accept the ethical ambiguity of this policymaking and seek consultation and engage in deliberation to approach it with the utmost caution. It is to build mechanisms that incorporate the perspectives of those served in this decision making, and to share power meaningfully so that these clients experience our discretion as a thoughtful exercise of professional authority, not an arbitrary or capricious exercise of personal fiat.

    The brief scenarios below come from my own social work practice. I’d love to hear from other social workers grappling with this whole idea of professional discretion and of the iterations of social work policy making within our organizations. How and when have you confronted this realization of your power? As a supervisor, how do you manage discretion for your direct reports? How do you build transparency and accountability into the policies made by your actions, the same way we seek to build these measures into policy we create in other contexts? How do we create a truly empowering relationship with clients, knowing that it is only through an embrace of our own power that we can hope to empower others?

  • As an Adult Protective Services worker, I was regularly humbled and rather stunned by the tremendous discretion that I and other APS workers had to make determinations about what constitutes abuse, neglect, or exploitation, who should be held responsible, and what the appropriate corrective actions are. When social workers go into someone’s home to ask these uncomfortable questions, we are exercising huge authority and serving as an arm of government power. And, most of the time, no one’s watching over our shoulders to be sure that we use this power “correctly”.
  • My work has often required interpreting for clients. Every single time, I am cognizant of the power that comes with this role–I am literally putting words in their mouths, and I’m filtering everything that they know about a situation that is often of real importance to them. While few social workers serve as multilingual interpreters, we all play roles in helping clients to navigate the social service delivery system, bridging gaps, and “translating” their circumstances for those unfamiliar with them. This makes us creators of reality, a gigantic power.

    We spend a lot more time talking about how others do policy to us–state legislatures, Congress, federal agencies–than about how we make policy. I think that’s because the latter is a lot more uncomfortable for us; it requires confronting our power and the often ‘sticky’ nature of our policy decisions. We owe it to our clients, though, to do this confronting. We are, for many of them at many points in time, the embodiment of policy’s potential to oppress or to empower, whether we like it or not.

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    The what? Why you should know/care about the social work congress

    Posted on July 26, 2010 by melindaklewis| 2 Comments

    A large, diffuse, diverse organization like the National Association of Social Workers has a real challenge in setting national direction while maintaining energized connection to members, in the field, who often feel disconnected from the workings of the umbrella organization. Achieving this unity of purpose, however, and being able to communicate it, is critically important in how the organization builds power and emerges as a force to be reckoned with in society.

    And, you know, I like to be a force to be reckoned with.

    That’s why I’m quite interested in the proceedings of the 2010 Social Work Congress and, in particular, in how few social workers (and students) with whom I’m in regular contact have any real idea about what the Social Work Congress is, or how its work setting a vision for the association could impact the profession’s trajectory.

    In order to advance that unity of purpose that I view as so important to our profession’s stature, then, I want to share some of the outcomes of the Social Work Congress. I want to hear social workers’ responses both to the content/tone of the imperatives that flowed from the two days of deliberations as well as to the process–how can/should NASW disseminate this information, and how can social workers in the field best engage in discussion about where our profession is headed, together?

    The participants in the 2010 Social Work Congress (of which I was not one) included representatives from state NASW chapters, the Council on Social Work Education, the country’s major social work organizations, and other leaders in the profession. The core of their work was to develop ten imperatives, which include integrating technology ethically and effectively into practice; improving recruitment and retention of social workers, especially by addressing debt relief and mentoring for students and young professionals; infusing models of business practice into social work; making the case for social work’s value to policymakers and the general public; and integrating leadership development into social work curricula.

    For my tastes, the imperatives aren’t explicit enough on what I view as THE imperative for our profession moving forward: building the power we need to successfully assert a vision of a just society, the kind where social workers’ services would be nearly irrelevant.

    The closest the imperatives come to talking about this kind of advocacy relates to strengthening the ability of social work organizations to speak with a unified voice on “issues of importance to the profession.” To me, though, that could mean those issues which more narrowly affect our own, individual, status, and not necessarily a collective demand for justice, the likes of which we know our clients deserve.

    Still, I’ve been part of some of these group decision-making processes, and I know something about how laborious they can be, and how much easier it is to sit on the outside and critique. There’s no denying that these ten are, at least, essential questions facing our profession in the near future and, so, worthy of our common attention.

    So, now, you know what the Social Work Congress is (although, just as an aside, weren’t you secretly hoping that now Congress was a Social Work Congress–what if Congress could be made up of nothing but social workers, at least for a day? That would be awesome.) I’m interested in your take–what would you see as the ten ‘imperatives’ facing the profession in the coming years? And how would you structure a process that makes this sort of deliberation resonate with all social workers, throughout this vast and disparate nation, and profession, of ours?

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    Another Argument for Diversity

    Posted on May 25, 2010 by melindaklewis| Leave a comment

    iqoncept, via Flickr

    Social workers talk quite a bit about diversity, really. Our Code of Ethics has strong language about respect for marginalized populations, and our Council of Social Work Education’s standards for courses include pretty strong language requiring inclusion of diversity. In my course evaluations every semester, students are specifically asked if I’ve done enough to include content on diverse populations.

    And that’s all absolutely good and important.

    But, lately, I’ve been thinking that we maybe rely too much on “it’s the right thing to do” kinds of arguments, when talking about the importance of diversity, instead of coupling that moral imperative with a discussion of the wisdom of diversity, as a matter of group performance and organizational excellence. After all, we know from advocacy that we make the best arguments when we appeal to both heart and head–why this is the right thing and why it’s the smart thing–and, in pushing our profession and our organizations to reflect more of the diversity around us, maybe that parallel track approach would help too.

    Because we need some work, honestly. Again, we talk a good game, but the truth is that our profession and the organizations in which we work still don’t fully embrace the full range of the diversity we serve. We still, too often, relegate the perspectives of people of color, people from other language backgrounds, people of diverse sexual orientations, people of different abilities, to a “special”, side track, rather than completely accounting for what we still need to do to be the diversity we so value (because, yes, that means aggressive Affirmative Action programs and targeted recruiting practices and lots of other initiatives that take money and hard work).

    In the book, The Wisdom of Crowds, which I picked up because you know how much I super-love crowdsourcing, the author presents some really fascinating research about how calculated diversity within groups does far more than just look good on an annual report: it absolutely helps the group to make better decisions.

    The book is worth reading, especially if you like reading about psychological experiments (!), but, essentially, in terms of this topic, what the research he presents finds is that a group of people, working on a problem from their own diverse perspectives, can come up with better solutions, most of the time, than any one individual (even a really smart one with a lot of knowledge about the problem), or, usually, even a group of really smart people from the same perspective.

    A lot of the reasons for those results align with the moral arguments social workers make about diversity: people are shaped by their own backgrounds and experiences, which make them approach problems differently and reach different conclusions. So, bringing people together who come from very different backgrounds and different interests can, in and of itself, increase the likelihood of getting a good decision.

    But this kind of diversity doesn’t just mean checking off different boxes for race or ethnicity or gender. We’re all embedded in our social context, after all, and that can mean that, even if we come from different places, spending a lot of time together can start to make us converge on the same (even if really bad) decisions.

    And we can’t afford those bad decisions. We’ve got to figure out how to best support low-income working mothers, what kinds of housing options work best for those leaving homelessness, what kids leaving foster care need to succeed. Solving those problems will mean approaching them with fresh minds, not foregone conclusions, and there are too many examples, from social work and beyond, of tightly-knit groups of rather similar people being blind to considerations that influenced their decision, sometimes with tragic results.

    That means that, if we want real organizational excellence, then we have to continually solicit the participation of new people, from new perspectives. Certainly some of our volunteers and even the general public can be part of this process, but it seems fairly obvious that developing a good system for endowing our clients with real decision-making roles is the surest way to institutionalize the kind of diversity that can lead to success.

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    I should make “Facebook” part of your learning contract??

    Posted on April 22, 2010 by melindaklewis| Leave a comment

    If something sits on your desktop long enough, and it’s about social media, someone will come out with something new and you don’t have to worry about it! And then, of course, the new thing sits for quite awhile, too, and then you wait until you’ve got a nice, natural tie-in (to rationalize the delays!)?

    So here’s the thing. There’s a lot of talk these days about nonprofit organizations and social media and whether it’s all just a lot of hype or whether there’s real potential there, and how we’ll ever know because organizations aren’t tracking outcomes like they should, and because they don’t have the money to invest the way that they’d need to in order to get the outcomes they want and…all anyone wants is to be like Charity:water and is that so wrong? Or so hard?

    The answers, of course, to those last two questions are no. And yes.

    But so what this got me thinking, since it’s April and in social work education land that means students interviewing with practicum sites and looking forward to next year and thinking about where they’ll fit in their next stage of actual practice (!), is that maybe we need to start carving out a role for social work students, at least those in a social work administration/advocacy practice-type concentration, for a social media presence within social work organizations.

    I know, all of the social media experts caution nonprofits that they can’t just solve their social media problems by sticking an intern on the task, but we know that social work practicum students are NOT just “interns”. They bring the value base and client-centeredness of social work, the support of their university setting, and, not insignificantly, a huge time commitment every week over a relatively long period. And, for the most part, they have some familiarity with social media, a passion for their organizations and their work, and a desire to let the world in on the terrific stuff that’s going on in their corner of it!

    I know it’s a bit of a stretch, but, if nonprofit leaders are successfully convincing their Boards of Directors and CEOs that they need to invest in social media (oftentimes at considerable financial cost), and if social media mavens like <a href="“>Heather Mansfield are coming up with really concrete, fairly easy ways to tell the impact that social media has on an organization and its work, can’t we convince field instructors and the field education powers that be that it has a place in social work education too?

    Here are some of my thoughts, based on a review of the learning contract for advanced administrative students, on how some basic social media strategies (like creating and maintaining a presence on social networking sites, using social news sites, and assisting with an organizational blog) might fit in:

  • “Briefly describe the history of your agency, being sure to emphasize historical and current mission statements, targeted clients, catchment area, and important partner agencies.”–This requires being able to tell an organization’s story, and those are the kinds of stories that can motivate people to action when told in a social medium. Think about a series of blog posts about turning points in a particular organization’s history, or using social media to connect to current and potential coalition partners in the community.
  • “Interview several direct service social workers and clients in order to gain an in-depth understanding of client needs (both met and unmet needs), the day-to-day activities of direct service social workers, and the challenges they face.” Again, these stories would be so compelling as blog posts, or accompanied by photos and posted as links to Facebook, or as part of a revamped, interactive organizational website. We need to think about how we can accomplish student learning goals while simultaneously advancing the organizational mission–that’s what field education is, at its best.
  • “Demonstrate the ability to represent the agency in a professionally responsible manner in the community.” Um, enough said?
  • “Use at least one advanced administrative practice skill designed to influence policy and/or program development, implementation, or change on behalf of clients and/or communities in the student’s chosen field of practice.” If we apply some of the evaluation techniques to figure out the impact of our social media work on our social change goals, this could fit very well. Certainly the relationship-building, message-crafting, and strategic planning that go into a good social media approach qualify as ‘advanced practice skills’.
  • “Apply knowledge, skill, and abilities to mobilize resources for meeting needs and enhancing well-being.” This could be really fun–maybe a Twitter-based fundraising campaign, or a Cause on Facebook, or a Flickr photo contest that ties into the organization’s website, driving traffic and boosting donations. As a field instructor, this was always a hard item for me to tackle, but I can see a lot of potential with social media.
  • “Demonstrate the use knowledge and skills to build teams and organizational cultures that maximize staff morale and engage community diversity and Demonstrate an understanding of how knowledge and skills can be applied to recruit, interview and hire prospective staff members/volunteers.” This is a particularly good fit, I think, given the necessarily social nature of social media and the opportunities to use outlets like blogging to build a sense of community, help workers to tell their stories, and bring in new people who will be committed to the organization’s mission.
  • And, finally, “Demonstrate the knowledge and skills needed to develop measures of status change, behavior change, client satisfaction, productivity, efficiency, resource acquisition, and staff morale for an agency program.” Maybe social work students could even design a social media program and its indicators of success, to develop an increased understanding of outcomes and how to track them while laying the foundation for the organization’s successful implementation of a social media approach?

    Look, I know that social media is never going to be the core of the social work field contract. Nor should it be. But I also know that social work, as a profession, has to be continually concerned with keeping our skills relevant, providing real value to those organizations who facilitate our very existence by providing field placements, and sustaining our work by helping the organizations where we practice to survive. Social media is showing some real promise in helping nonprofit organizations to connect to new people in new ways and build momentum around their work, and I think that social work students are particularly well-poised to play a role in this revolution.

    Now, let me know if you want some help figuring out how to approach your supervisor!

    Materials:
    Study on Nonprofits and Social Media ROI (or lack thereof)

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    Good news for social work administrator salaries?

    Posted on April 21, 2010 by melindaklewis| Leave a comment

    by nomm de photo, via Flickr's Creative Commons

    The nonprofit world has been buzzing for the past few months over news of long-awaited changes in how nonprofit organizations are rated. For several years, the primary measure of nonprofit “excellence”, according to many of the sector watchdog organizations which prospective donors and others consult before making decisions of support, has been the ‘overhead’ to ‘program’ ratio (both in quotes because of their rather dubious definitions). There are tremendous problems with this very blunt measure, the most serious of which is the fact that it does not actually measure anything very helpful about a nonprofit’s work at all, namely: is it actually solving the social problem it sets out to solve?

    But another problem with the reliance on overhead ratios as the benchmark of nonprofit success is its depressing effect on the salaries of those working within nonprofits because, of course, salaries are most often counted as “overhead”, especially the salaries of nonprofit administrators (anyone not engaged in direct programming).

    But there is cause for hope, as macro practice social workers head for graduation this spring, when many will officially become part of nonprofit organizations’ “overhead”, applying their skills and knowledge to the effective operation of organizations that, if led by talented people with clear visions of social change and real leadership to marshal resources towards that change, will be part of the solution to our most vexing social ills.

    Late last fall, Charity Navigator, the largest and most prominent of the nonprofit watchdog groups, announced that they are totally revamping their formulas for evaluating nonprofit organizations. They will heavily discount their old reliance on overhead ratios in favor of (yet unannounced) metrics that emphasize impact.

    Very exciting, really, for all of us who care far more that our nonprofit organizations actually achieve what it is that they set out to do, rather than how much money they spend on salaries in order to get it done. (And, as an aside, I really think that’s just about everyone. I mean, people get all riled up about xyz nonprofit executive making “too much money”, but if I show them a program that spends 100% of its revenues on ‘program’, say, having a volunteer hand out $100 bills to homeless people, I can guarantee you that they wouldn’t be too excited.)

    But, it’s almost graduation time, so let’s talk about what’s really on the minds of macro practice soon-to-be social workers everywhere: getting a job that will pay you a decent (read: pay your loans and still earn a real, living wage) salary.

    According to the most recent Bureau of Labor Statistics data, the median hourly wage for social service managers, the closest category to social work administration, was $26.92/hour. Assuming full-time work (which, certainly, cannot be assumed in today’s economy, but most management positions are full-time), you’re looking at about $54,000/year. Doesn’t sound that bad, probably, except when you consider that that’s a national figure, which is distorted by the much higher costs of living in some parts of the country (and correspondingly higher wages) and when you look at the BLS numbers for chief executives, who earn a median $76.23/hour, about three times as much, to do very similar kinds of work: manage budgets, oversee personnel, interface with external stakeholders, plan for the future, deal with threats, and solve problems.

    Enter this whole discussion about overhead and how we should define and monitor a “good” nonprofit organization. The way that I see it, as long as low overhead equals good organization, then there are very powerful incentives for nonprofit leaders, including other social work administrators, to keep administrative salaries low, even dangerously low, to the extent that it can be difficult to recruit and retain the best and brightest minds.

    If, conversely, we start defining a good nonprofit organization as one that excels at its mission, that succeeds in addressing the problem that is its target, that innovates, that surpasses expectations…then won’t there be just as powerful an incentive to find the very best person possible to lead that organization, even if it costs more to hire her?

    It’s crazy, really, when you think about it. If a society’s values are lived out in its allocation of resources (which they largely are), then it would appear that we value the creation of new items for Taco Bell’s value menu more than the eradication of homelessness. Or the cure for AIDS. Or the end of child abuse.

    You get the idea.

    There will obviously be a lag, as the changes in the sector’s barometer slowly infuse themselves into organizational practices. But I truly believe that we’ll see a rise in the demand for top-notch nonprofit organizational leadership in the years to come, and the salaries to go along with it.

    Now social work administrators have to make the case that we are uniquely qualified to provide that leadership. That’s another challenge, but one that I can imagine my students and former students will tackle with gusto.

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    It’s that time of year again…J-O-B

    Posted on April 19, 2010 by melindaklewis| Leave a comment

    So another terrific class of macro social workers is getting ready to graduate from the University of Kansas (and, I’m certain, many other schools of social work around the country!), and, while the social work job market may not be quite as tight has it was for the class of 2009, it’s still a rough field out there. At this time of year, my thoughts turn to job searching in macro practice and how to help graduating students and other social workers who are looking for macro practice jobs. To get us started, here is a list of links of online job sources (all in nonprofit/social change work), a couple of articles about job searching in a recession, and a presentation on using purposeful internships to set yourself apart from other candidates (it’s good; sorry for the random punctuation around it–I spent 30 minutes trying to cut it out and moved on!).

    Keep me posted on your job search process, and please, once you’re successful finding a great job that allows you to advance your life while serving your cause, share your tips!

    Opportunity Knocks
    Opportunity Knocks has listings of nonprofit jobs, a Nonprofit Wage and Benefit Report, a place to post your resume, tons of helpful articles, and a list of job fairs around the country.

    Idealist.Org
    Idealist has nonprofit job listings and hosts career fairs in a number of cities. Sign up for email alerts for nonprofit jobs in your area.

    Jobs For Change
    This is the one that I wrote up last year. They also have columns and advice for job seekers.

    Nonprofit-Jobs
    Mostly administrative-type jobs in the nonprofit, health care, and government sectors.

    Philanthropy Careers
    These are pretty fundraising-heavy listings, but there are some administrative positions, too, and it has high volume.

    Council on Foundations
    This site has a lot of postings and thorough descriptions.

    Philanthropy Journal
    This site includes entry-level nonprofit jobs plus those in management/leadership.

    The NonProfit Times
    This is kind of old-school, basically the classified ads for the nonprofit world’s newspaper. They also operate a career advice center.

    DotOrgJobs
    This is unofficially for the Gen-X and Gen-Yers–part of OnPhilanthropy. I subscribe to their FLiP blog for insights on nonprofit leadership for young adults.

    Don’t forget Craigslist. More nonprofits are putting openings there because it’s a free listing.

    More Resources:
    Nonprofit Job Searching in Tough Times

    Nonprofit Job Search Tips

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    Recession-Proof Graduate
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    Nonprofit Leadership: The Next Frontier

    Posted on March 10, 2010 by melindaklewis| Leave a comment

    photo credit: ButterflySun via Flickr

    I’ve had this report, Ready to Lead, on my desktop for a few months, but I just got around to reading it. If you share my concerns about the future of our nonprofit sector, are headed to executive leadership in a nonprofit organization yourself, and/or have questions about the leadership in your area of practice, you should read the whole report (it includes a thorough overview of the sample and methodology, so I’m not reiterating that either). Here, I’m highlighting some of the findings that have the most relevance for social workers, and for the organizations in which we work. In particular, although the authors of the report didn’t include this at all, there are some public policy approaches (big surprise!) that I think could help to address some of the challenges and gaps indicated by respondents.

    I’d love to know what you think, not just about this report but about the state of leadership in your nonprofit. If you are a young professional, what do you see as your career trajectory? What influences your professional decisionmaking about organizations and positions within them? What skills and experiences must good nonprofit leaders possess? If you want to lead a nonprofit organization, do you feel ‘ready’ to do so? If not, what help do you need? What would help your current leadership to succeed?

    Most provocative findings, and my thoughts:

  • By 2016, the nonprofit sector will need ~80,000 new managers per year! They have to come from somewhere, and, as we think about the future of social work and social work education, we have to figure out if we’re committed to ‘growing’ these leaders ourselves, and to really carving out a niche in nonprofit leadership, or if we’re going to see those positions go increasingly to individuals from the corporate world and/or from planning or nonprofit administration programs. It matters, I believe, what value perspective the leaders of our organizations share, but we have to acknowledge the fact that the vast majority of social workers choose a more direct practice/clinical track, and that that may mean that social workers increasingly find themselves working for non-social workers.
  • These worker preferences, in fact, continue to influence career decision making well into an individual’s advancement. Fifty-five percent of the sample (most of whom are already working in nonprofits) say that their interests or skills don’t align with executive leadership in nonprofits. Fear of distancing themselves from the work and/or reducing their job satisfaction were some of the primary concerns.
  • There’s not as much ‘hiring from within’ as in the for-profit sector–only ~1/3 of current executive directors were hired from their own organization, and 55% of survey respondents believe that they need to leave their current organizations in order to advance.
  • Not surprisingly, these experiences are different for women and people of color than for white men. While more people of color and foreign-born nonprofit workers aspire to executive leadership, white men in the sample were more likely to be on a leadership track, more likely to have received executive coaching, and more likely to say that they are currently ‘ready’ to lead. Obviously, this has major implications for social work education, which also tends to attract a majority white student body. If we’re going to truly reflect our society, and best equip our organizations with talented, skilled, prepared individuals with a desire to lead our organizations into the future, we have to aggressively recruit, actively mentor, and intentionally place more bright leaders of color.
  • Only 17% of respondents have a degree or certificate in nonprofit management or administration. Importantly, of those who do, relatively few feel that it, specifically, has prepared them for nonprofit leadership. Again, as we think about the future of our profession, we need to continually evaluate the skills and competencies that we transmit through our degree programs, communicating with nonprofit organizations about those skills they most need.
  • We need to confront the financial realities; many of our most talented nonprofit employees may leave nonprofits, especially as the economy improves, so that they can earn more money. One of the recommendations was that foundations invest in multiyear funding and institutional capital to allow for more adequate compensation packages and to facilitate succession planning. But here’s where public policy can come into play, too. Several respondents mentioned student loan debt as a major concern–obviously, more state and federal aid directly to higher education, as well as more generous financial aid packages, could reverse the tide of rising student debt and free graduates to make career decisions without worrying about default. Likewise, young nonprofit workers are particularly concerned about retirement savings; ensuring Social Security’s long-term solvency as well as adequacy, and restoring a measure of progressivity to pension/retirement systems could take some of this pressure off young workers during their careers.
  • And we can’t ignore the role that nonprofit organizational culture itself plays in creating and perpetuating this problem. Several respondents mentioned the ‘dated power structures’ that inhibit mentoring; the poor work/life balance; and the increasing demands on executive directors to do more with less as disincentives to their own pursuit of executive leadership. Addressing these factors as part of organizational advocacy strategies could make work life better for all those in nonprofits, improve agency functioning for clients, and, in the long-run, make these institutions easier to run, thus attracting more candidates for the job!

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    Social workers and social movements

    Posted on March 8, 2010 by melindaklewis| Leave a comment

    Now THAT’S a movement!

    We have known for a while that launching a campaign wasn’t enough – its a good way to raise awareness and attention for an issue, but when the campaign ends, the momentum fades. Movements are designed to go further, do more to sustain people’s interest and participation, and of course drive greater impact.

    Movements change lives, not just laws.

    But in the vernacular of organizing, especially online, I’m increasingly concerned that the word ‘movement’ has simply replaced the word ‘campaign.’ Everybody wants to start a movement, and understand how to use technology, and social media, to make that happen. But few are willing to embrace the huge commitments necessary to create and sustain a movement. The term is being co-opted, the level of excitement and commitment towards creating movements is growing, but we are still running in place in terms of truly shifting how causes are addressed.

    We’re in danger of forgetting that calling something a “movement” doesn’t make it so, and that movements are not measured by the number of Twitter followers you have.

    In doing research on the whole idea of social movements in the digital age, I came across some really good resources that say a lot of what I was thinking (LOVE when that happens!)–about the need to connect offline and online interactions, so that relationships are real; the potential of new media to reduce the costs associated with bringing people together; the importance of empowering people to find their own place within a movement (rather than expecting everyone to “click here”); the flexibility to go not only from local to global, as social movements have traditionally evolved, but also from global to local, as people find ways to connect with known others around an issue first presented to them by unknowns–in essence, about the power of social media as a tool for social movement building, rather than as an inevitable movement in itself.

    So, since I’ve got Duplo towers to build and dozens of stories about big trucks to read, I want to share some of the great resources about social movements and movement building 2.0 and instead focus my comments on wondering:

    “What’s up with social workers and social movements, anyhow?”

    If you think about it, it’s kind of odd. Here we are, this pretty big profession with hundreds of thousands of super-passionate, well-informed, dedicated people working on the kinds of core social justice issues around which movements are born. And yet, throughout history, social workers have, for the most part, played rather peripheral roles in the major social movements that have defined our times. Most scholars of social work history believe that, in fact, social work activism during ‘peak’ periods (the 1930s and 1960s, in particular) is inflated, and social work retrenchment during the 1980s, for example, is overstated as well. For the most part, social workers have been impacted by social movements far more than they have driven them.

    Why is this? And what does it say about our profession? And its role in movement building?

    I think that, in essence, the issue is the definition of social movements. I looked up a lot of different definitions, and they all look something like this: “Social movements are a type of group action. They are large informal groupings of individuals and/or organizations focused on specific political or social issues, in other words, on carrying out, resisting or undoing a social change” (wikipedia.org). Large. Informal. Group action. NOT the kind of thing typically led by professionals who are, in most instances, arms of the same ‘system’ against which the movement is, in some way, arrayed. So, while perhaps disappointing to the most idealistic and radical among us (who? where?), it’s not surprising that there is little role for our profession, with its dual emphases on social control and social assistance, in movements that seek to fundamentally realign the distribution of power in our society.

    But what about social workers as people? As in, not in our professional capacity but as individuals who, after all, went into this profession because we really, really care about people and really, really hate injustice–what role for us within social movements?

    Certainly, here, it’s much harder to get a good sense of what history looks like; we have no way of knowing, definitely, how many social workers, in their personal capacity, were engaged, for example, in the struggle for civil rights, the women’s movement, and the peace movement. Probably many.

    But I do think that there are some serious ways in which our profession discourages this full expression of social workers’ politics and, in so doing, deprives social movements of some of their potentially most valuable ‘foot soldiers’ while simultaneously denying social workers their right to full pursuit of human liberation. These are the points I want us to collectively consider:

  • Excessive workloads and social worker burnout fry people at work, use up their creativity and compassion, and push them to retreat in their personal lives.
  • The overly cautious divorce of politics from nonprofit organizational life sends social workers the message that they must sever their political from their professional selves. We know that this is damaging for both ‘halves’ of the social worker.
  • The emphasis, within social work education, on professionalization and skill development at the expense of political consciousness takes students away from activism at precisely the time of their lives when they may have the greatest exposure and opportunity for participation (which could plant the seeds for later involvement).
  • The segregation within nonprofit organizations, with underrepresentation, particularly of people of color, is echoed in residential segregation, combining to deprive many social workers of access to diverse peers with whom to build strong movements for change. When we only interact with people of different races, socioeconomic statuses, and sexual orientations in a client:worker relationship, we’re not only living stunted lives but are also locked out of opportunities for solidarity.
  • Declining unionization of social workers and a move away from collective bargaining and toward ‘professionalization’ (in quotes because it’s a false dichotomy between unionization and professionalization!) deprive social workers of our society’s best practice grounds for unified action and democratic movement building: the labor movement. Many movement leaders got their start within labor, and organized labor continues to be at the forefront of movements for justice for workers, immigrants, women, and people of color. Social work just doesn’t participate much.

    So what do you think? Have you been part of a social movement? Do you see yourself as part of a movement now? Does your social work identity reinforce your movement participation? Or is your consciousness within the movement separated from your professional orientation? What could social work do to be a part of movement building? Should we take this on as a profession? And what will movement building look like in this new decade?

    Materials:
    Beth’s Blog on Bridging Old and New Models

    And Beth’s Blog on Cause Fatigue and Movement Building”

    Finally, Beth’s Blog on Movement Building Resources

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    POWER. What are we afraid of?

    Posted on March 3, 2010 by melindaklewis| Leave a comment

    In every class I teach, I find myself talking a lot about power, not just what it is and why it’s important but also why social workers often have such a negative idea about it. Because that last piece is key, I really believe; as long as social workers are so convinced that power is a bad thing, that we shouldn’t want it, and that we don’t, in fact (we promise!) have any, then there’s no way that we can do real empowerment and little chance that we can bring about the kinds of social changes that our profession, our society, and, most importantly, those we serve, really need.

    Being bilingual helps me a lot when it comes to defining power. The Spanish word for the noun “power” is the same as for the verb “to be able to” (poder), so I talk with my students about how power, essentially, gives one the ability to do what it is that one wants to be able to do and, really, to make someone else do what it is that one wants that other to do. Some of the definitions I like include “the ability to recognize one’s will even against the resistance of others” (Weber, in Gerth and Mills, 1946); “possession of control, authority, or influence over others” or “ability to act or produce an effect” (Merriam Webster Dictionary); and “capacity to influence the forces which affect one’s life space for one’s own benefit” (Pinderhughes, 1987). When we start from that understanding, power doesn’t sound quite so dark.

    One of my big emphases, too, is a distinction between actual power and the feeling of being powerful. As social workers, sometimes we’re so afraid of real power that we just talk in “squishy” terms about it, which can lead to so much confusion about what power is that we abandon the real thing in favor of something that just sounds good. I’ll never forget, when I was assisting in a power analysis with some Latino youth and the lead organizer asked, “who has power in your community?” One young woman answered, “we do, because we’re the future…” It was obviously something that she’d heard, maybe from a teacher or maybe from a social worker, and, while we like the way that feels, the truth is that such a misconception kept her from being fully powerful, because she couldn’t analyze who held power and what power she and her peers might hold over those power players. We do ourselves and our clients no favors when we lead them to believe that they are more powerful than they are—what they (and we) really need is the ability to analyze power relations and to engage in collective action designed to enhance individual and group power.

    We talk about sources of power–character, position, reputation, knowledge, authority–and we talk especially about relationships as a source of power, because that helps us to see, as social workers, how the assumption of power (double meaning intended) is integral to the practice of social work; if we didn’t have any power with/over those with whom we work, what possible influence could we expect to have over their lives?

    And then we get to the core issue, for me: social workers’ fear of power. I have to admit, I don’t totally, innately get this reluctance to admit and claim power. I often tell students that my dream job would be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, and it’s because of the authority that comes with that position. I love power for what it can enable me to do in pursuit of social justice, and I’d love a whole lot more so that I could be a whole lot more effective.

    But I have to understand social workers’ fears about power to be a part of helping our profession get over them, and I think that my discussions with students and those in the field over the past several years have given me some insights. There’s a universal concern that power corrupts, because it certainly can. And there’s also a reluctance, I believe, to give up social workers’ martyrdom, this idea that our profession is noble precisely because it is relatively powerless. Many social workers also have negative experience with powerful interests opposed to their own or their clients’ well-being, and, absent more just conceptions of what power looks like, it takes on a ‘bad name’.

    The reality is clients want to work with powerful workers. Power can only be shared by those who have it, so a powerless social worker cannot, by definition, practice empowering social work. Those social workers who are more powerful, both within their own organizational contexts and in the community arena, are also more successful. And that’s what we should be in this business for, after all, not the satisfaction that comes with feeling that we’re sacrificing for some futile aim. And if that doesn’t convince us to pursue power, we must recognize that abdicating our claim to power abandons the field to those who don’t share our values and aims. Power vacuums are always filled, and we can’t afford them.

    So, tell me, what gives you power as a social worker? When do you feel powerful? When do you feel powerless? What are your fears about power? Where do those fears come from? How could you gain power within your organization? What would it take for you to commit yourself to that this year?

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