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.
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.
Classroom to Capitol 
Striking the 49 and 51
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.
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Posted in Analysis and Commentary, My New Favorite Thing
Tagged direct practice, nonprofit organizations, radical social work, social change