Tag Archives: radical social work

Unfaithful Angels? Social work and social change

Posted on February 21, 2013 by melindaklewis | 6 comments

Because I like to make sure my students are paying attention, and because I’m not exactly afraid of controversy, I like to start my Advanced Advocacy and Community Practice course with that classic Specht and Courtney reading, guaranteed to inflame the passions of social workers on both ends of the macro-micro continuum (and, yes, I think it’s a continuum, not two distinct camps):

Unfaithful Angels.

I mean, talk about astute titling. Could there be language more likely to spark debate?

After we read, I ask my students: Has social work abandoned its mission? More importantly, perhaps, and certainly more personally, have social workers?

There is a tendency, among my students and, I believe, among many social workers, to think that our career choice automatically implies altruism. We are social workers; ipso facto, we are in this for ‘the right reasons’.

It’s dangerous logic, I believe, both because it devalues the profession by implication, assuming that the only reason that someone would choose social work is out of a peculiar desire for martyrdom, but also because it can lull us into a sort of complacency, such that anything that we’re doing must be worthwhile…because we’re social workers.

Surrounded by worsening problems and abject need, complacency is one thing we do not need.

So I assign students to read Unfaithful Angels in part to peel away the gauze in which we sometimes place the profession, and to force us, collectively, to confront the evidence about what social workers do, and why, and the extent to which we’re living up to our own ideals.

I always wish that the debates that ensue happened in social work classes other than my own, since I tend to teach those students who have chosen macro practice rather than clinical work, which increases the risk that our conversations about Unfaithful Angels deteriorate into blaming ‘those’ social workers. And, of course, self-righteousness isn’t too becoming for anyone, nor the path I’m hoping to help my students navigate.

So what I try to do is ask, pointedly, why they care so much (because they inevitably do) about how social work is viewed, as a profession, and about how social workers devote their time. We talk about the policy structures that influence individual social worker’s career decisions, from third-party payments to the privatization of public services to the caseload increases that make adding advocacy so difficult. We talk about radical practice, and why that concept makes us so uncomfortable. We own our failings, as a profession, and then we imagine what it would look like if every social worker was committed to fundamental social change.

I make them choose a side: Has social work abandoned its mission? What was that mission, as they understand it? Is work with those who are economically poor the only ‘true’ social work? Is organizing and macro change?

They are usually at least somewhat distraught.

And then I try to use that upset as the platform for what, to me, is where we need to come down on these questions: Yes, social workers have drifted away from our core, but not because more social workers are in private practice. The profession’s mission, to me, isn’t as much about any practice venue, or even any population, as much as it is a stance of opposition to injustice, wherever and whenever it is found.

And we abandoned that mission–we actively abandon it, still today–every time we choose prestige over protest.

We’re not angels.

We never were.

And the grassroots group that, even reluctantly, takes grant money from the same corporations that are funding attacks on the social safety net (in the guise of ‘more competitive tax rates’) are just as complicit as the social worker who crafts a practice providing counseling to the ‘worried well’.

That private practitioner could be actively using radical approaches to gender dynamics in her practice, taking on clients without ability to pay, and agitating her elected officials for universal access to mental health care. Or not.

Promoting social change doesn’t mean turning the social work profession into a police state.

It requires each of us committing ourselves to careers that are vehicles for justice. In all manifestations. Every day.

Striking the 49 and 51

Posted on September 29, 2011 by melindaklewis | Leave a comment

A few weeks ago, I got to spend almost an entire day with Robert Egger.

Yeah, I know.

From our introduction, when he mentioned that he’d made it over to the Brown v. Board of Education site already (it was 9AM), I knew that we were really going to get along well.

The whole day was a complete reinvigoration for me, and my brain is overflowing with ideas and challenges to myself and new applications and affirmation of some things I’ve been mulling for quite a while. But there’s one particular point he made that I almost can’t stop thinking about, and that has kind of totally revolutionized how I talk about advocacy and systems change with nonprofit social service organizations.

It was a really, really great day.

One of my colleagues asked him about the starfish story, and his noted aversion to it. In reply, he talked about how, obviously, some of his work at the DC Central Kitchen involves throwing back the starfish–feeding people who are hungry, employing people who need jobs, meeting people’s urgent needs.

So where’s the social change work? Where’s the advocacy? Where’s the radical revisioning of the possibilities of tomorrow?

Answer: it’s 51% of his work. Not usually more, because, after all, people are hungry and need jobs–if the symptoms we’re addressing through our direct service work aren’t serious and worthy, then we need to be in different mission work.

But not less, either, because if the daily activities of maintaining the organization and addressing those presenting problems (but not their roots) take over, we’re (in his words) “feeding the machine”, instead of solving real systemic challenges.

So what does that mean, then, for a social worker in direct practice, or for an Executive Director of a large nonprofit organization–or anyone in between?

It means weaving consciousness-raising and systems change into your interactions with clients, so that, even as you’re handing out what they need, you’re helping them to question the conditions and structues that perpetuate their crises.

It means surrounding oneself with like-minded and totally committed colleagues, so that the organization can flourish without constantly consuming your energies.

It means, though, more than anything, checking ourselves.

We can’t ever pretend that we have the luxury of only railing against the system that causes hurt, when we have a calling to help heal those wounds, too. And we can’t ever pretend that putting on Band-Aids is enough, because then we’re, unintentionally or not, working to guarantee ourselves future work. Which is unconscionable.

I’d never pretend that finding that 49 and 51 (it’s not a balance, of course, and it can’t be) is easy. Nor would Robert, who spent hours with my fellow Kansans, helping us to think through where our nonprofit sector needs to go, and what it needs to be, to make justice rain down on our prairies.

But that sweet spot is my new mantra, and it explains the way that I see my work and, indeed, my life:

49% meeting people where they are, salving the pains caused by structures that trap people in poverty and racism and violence and desperation.

And 51% trying to tear down those same structures, bringing everything that I know about radical relationships and strategic alliances and the transformative process of helping people find their own power.

If we can get it right, I fully believe, someday I’ll become a baker. Or a farmer.

And Robert can go back to nightclubs, if he wants.

Because our work here will be done.

Too vulnerable for empowerment?

Posted on August 23, 2011 by melindaklewis | 59 comments

*This is one of my all-time favorite stories, and favorite messages, too, so I’m republishing it in these final days of my maternity leave, as an inspiration to me and, I hope, to you, too.

Fairly often, when I talk with social workers about involving their clients in advocacy and organizing, encouraging them to find their own voices and to create social change for themselves, I hear some variation on “yes, but our clients are too poor/overwhelmed/scared/uneducated to play that role. We have to advocate for them.”

And that always prompts a discussion about how we are often the biggest barriers to our clients’ full empowerment, that we project our own fears and limitations onto their lives, or lack the relationship with them that would create a context for real risk taking. We need to get over ourselves, so to speak, and figure out ways, hand-in-hand with our clients, over, around, and through every obstacle that we might imagine (and many are, in fact, imagined) to their self-advocacy. But we have to figure out how to do that authentically and respectfully and honestly.

As I’m sure you’re not surprised, there was something in Half the Sky (have you read it yet? Go get it!) that spoke to this, too. Chapter Three was probably the most stunning part of the whole book for me, because it basically tells the story of a slum in India where women rose up against a violent criminal warlord who was raping, stealing, and murdering. Galvanized by his threats to a prominent woman from their own community, the women overcame their fears and, collectively, stabbed him to death, each one cutting him once.

No, I’m not saying that we start encouraging our clients to take this kind of direct action; we have a Code of Ethics, and I’ve written before about what that compels regarding appropriate means and ends.

But what got to me, and to the authors, was this: these were women who not only had generalized fears about taking action that is contrary to cultural and social ideas about women’s roles but was also in direct contradiction to the political powers in the area (all of whom also feared this guy)–they also had abundant evidence that their lives were directly at risk; he had, in fact, tortured and killed many of their neighbors.

And yet they did it anyway. And their lives, and their community, were transformed as a result. And the lessons that the authors take from this utterly dramatic tale are ones that carry tremendous significance for social workers and all who work with vulnerable people who must find their own voices and their own emancipation, too:

We cannot push people into roles that carry tremendous danger; to do so would be morally indefensible and strategically unwise. Especially when we are working outside of our own natural communities, we cannot pretend to really understand the risks, and there is so much uncertainty in the world of social change that sometimes our best approximation of ‘informed consent’ is all we can manage. We are not a profession that throws people under the bus, even in pursuit of some ‘larger good.’

HOWEVER, when people show willingness to take these risks and to stand up and speak out, we must unconditionally and immediately support them. We must build organizations, institutions, public pressure to protect and defend them and to amplify their voices. They need, and deserve, to be believed in and heard and championed, not discouraged or marginalized or patronized.

Finally, we must build capacity within individuals so that they are more prepared to stand up for their own rights. Our public policies should provide education and basic support so that people, especially the most vulnerable, are equipped to be effective advocates on their own behalf. And our work with individuals should be radical, committed always to empowerment that actually builds real, meaningful power that can be leveraged for substantial social change.

I used to answer those social workers who would give me excuses for why their clients couldn’t be their own advocates with something like, “if limited English proficient immigrants who aren’t even legally supposed to be in this country can be their own spokespeople, and can get out in the street and protest and testify in the legislature and organize unions, then so can [fill in the blank].” Now I’ve got a better answer: “if Indian women of the lowest caste, living in a slum ruled by a sadistic gangster, can rise up together and rid their community of his violent barbarism, then [fill in the blank]…”

If we can lose our hesitations, the possibilities are endless.

59 Comments

Posted in Analysis and Commentary

Tagged advocacy, clients, empowerment, radical social work

Why we need visions

Posted on January 12, 2011 by melindaklewis | Leave a comment

I’ve written here before about why it’s important to have advocacy in your mission statement.

I believe that; I think that articulating that advocacy is a part of what we do, and how, is an important signal organizations give to themselves, those they serve, and their potential allies. Mission statements describe the problems our organizations are trying to solve, and often how we think that we’ll successfully address them. They are our reason for being, and they’re what people should be able to hold us accountable to.

And advocacy belongs there.

But, today, for the final post in Organizational Transformation Week, I’m focused on vision statements instead. Vision statements describe the world as we want it to be. They are aspirational, not necessarily measurable. For that reason, they are sometimes seen as expendable, as “fluff” that might be inspirational for a staff retreat but do not really deserve top billing on your organization’s website, or in your grant applications.

But giving short shrift to visions, and to the visioning process from which they flow, is a mistake, especially for organizations committed to embracing a social change approach and to pivoting their services to address not just the consequences of injustice but the root causes, too.

My work with organizations around the framework of The Building Movement Project is what really drove home, for me, the significance of vision statements and the particular roles they can play in charting an organization’s social change direction. They always describe a transformed world that, by necessity, demands transformed organizations. They are always larger than any one organization can accomplish on its own, prompting leaders to think about how to ally themselves with strategic partners. They always require policy changes, suggesting advocacy priorities. And they always stretch our thinking, to imagine a world fundamentally different in distribution of resources and power.

A vision statement is not a summary of long-term goals from your organization’s strategic plan.

It’s not an extension of your mission statement that guarantees the need for your work in perpetuity.

It’s a call to arms, a rousing slogan for a protest poster, a beautiful dream of the world as it should be.

Developing your vision statement, then, should involve a process that, itself, approaches the ideals captured in that vision. It should be participatory, and empowering, because that’s how we want our future to be. It should flow from the deepest desires and most urgent hopes of those with whom we work, because few people get excited about working for someone else’s vision for their lives. It should be beyond the realm of what’s possible today, because otherwise we’re allowing our tomorrows to be crippled by the mundane constraints of “feasibility”.

Our vision statements, then, are, in a sense, reminders of why organizational transformation is such a critical task, guideposts to where that transformation should take us, and sustenance for the journey that can be arduous and grueling.

We need them. And we need them to be really, really great.

There are worse things than unemployment

Posted on June 3, 2010 by melindaklewis | 2 comments

I struggled with the title of this post, a lot. I certainly don’t mean to trivialize the panic, or the grinding discouragement, wrought by our nation’s current epidemic of unemployment. It’s a crisis. It deserves our attention. And its victims deserve justice, and jobs.

I want to convey my frustration, though, with a mentality that is unfortunately pervasive in much of social services, perhaps especially right now–a kind of “the poor are always with us”, “at least we have job security”, gallows humor that underlines a systemic problem in our profession, and in our sector:

We keep forgetting that we’re supposed to be working ourselves out of jobs.

As I was doing a literature review for the instructors’ resources for a policy textbook on which I’m assisting, I came across the line, “workers and their supervisors will struggle with new issues such as, does the agency (or position) exist for the worker or the client?” Um, seriously? That’s a question at all? And a “new” one, at that?

There is a passage in Robert Egger’s book that reinforced this point for me. He frames it first in terms of asking who is really being served by a program that serves food to people experiencing homelessness–is it more about ending hunger, or more about providing an opportunity for fellowship and service for the volunteers? And, while he and Dan Pallotta certainly don’t agree on much, that question reminded me of Pallotta’s exhortation that we never allow nonprofit work to be about making us feel noble, or sacrificial, or superior.

Because, when we do, or even when we start thinking in terms of job security rather than fundamental social change, we stop keeping those we serve, and, more importantly their RIGHT NOT TO NEED US, from being foremost in their minds.

I mean, I’m sure that many of your clients like you. And that’s good. But they shouldn’t have to keep being your clients. We shouldn’t, as Egger relates, say “see you tomorrow” every day to people coming to receive meals for the homeless. We should be asking ourselves every day, every month, every year what we did to address the core problems that create the need that our services address, so that we’re sure that we’re always moving towards our own irrelevance. We need to have a strategy, and a vision–a roadmap of sorts that tells us what victory looks like and how we’re going to get there. We need to do more than just stay busy at work every day (because that’s the easy part); we need to stop being content to throw starfish back into the ocean when the whole beach needs to be cleaned up (I was so relieved to find that I’m not the only person who finds that story more dismaying than uplifting; at least there are two of us heartless folks in this business!). We need to have a vision of what we’ll do for a living when we don’t need foster care workers or welfare case managers or oncological social workers or anti-poverty organizers anymore.

Because if you’re not hoping for that, you don’t really believe that what you and your clients are doing together can change the world. You’re settling for the status quo, when what they deserve is a radical change. He starts the book with a quote that has become my new favorite: “they teach you to fix what needs to be broke,” Paul Westerberg (p. 1–see why I like him so much?). To me, that quote forces social workers to come to terms with the dual mission of our profession: social justice and social control, and to locate ourselves firmly on the side of justice, even when (especially when!) it means reshaping society in such a way that our services are no longer required, thank you very much.

Me, personally, in the wonderful world of tomorrow, I think I’d like to bake scones or grow cut flowers for profit. Or make beautiful cakes. Or run elections…or be Chief Justice of the Supreme Court. That would still be good.

photo by neviepiecake, via flickr

2 Comments

Posted in Analysis and Commentary

Tagged evaluation, nonprofit organizations, radical 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.

Tag Archives: radical social work

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