by Erlene Grise-Owens, EdD, LCSW, MSW, MRE, and Justin “Jay” Miller, PhD, MSW, CSW
March 15 is World Social Work Day, designated to have fun the “exhausting work and diligence of social employees.” The theme for 2022 is Co-Building a New Eco-Social World: Leaving No One Behind. This theme conveys a “imaginative and prescient and motion plan to create new international values, insurance policies, and practices…for all folks and the sustainability of the planet.”
World Social Work Day “promotes the very best practices of social work.” As a part of this celebration and dedication to greatest practices, we wish to articulate how take care of society and the planet is crucially related with practitioner self-care.
Eco-Social World and a Meta-Apply Framework
Eco-Social Work emphasizes the necessity for social employees to advertise social justice via very important consideration to the symbiotic relationship between people and the pure world. Eco-social work takes a programs perspective, a core strategy in social work. This attitude emphasizes the crucial impression of interdependence in systemic change. As an example, one core tenet is that change in a single a part of the system impacts the entire system.
Our conceptualization of meta-practice builds on this programs perspective. Meta-practice reframes the normal micro, mezzo, and macro ranges of follow. On this expansive paradigm, meta-practice revisions follow arenas as interconnected and iterative areas—quite than hierarchical, disconnected ranges. Making use of this expansive framework, one’s personal well-being is inextricably and iteratively interdependent with bigger programs well-being.
Meredith C. F. Powers and Sandra Engstrom, in “Radical Self-Care for Social Workers in the Global Climate Crisis,” describe how social work’s engagement in a justice-focused eco-social world requires self-care. These authors articulate the reverberating impacts of environmental degradation and different environmental injustices—as each arenas of our social work follow and sides of our private well-being. They conclude, “By radical self-care we are able to turn into individuals who embrace therapeutic and peace inside ourselves—after which we are able to supply it to others and to our stunning Mom Earth” (p. 35).
Fractals of Life
Equally, in Emergent Strategy—Shaping Change, Changing Worlds, adrienne maree brown emphasizes the significance of understanding the important thing function of fractals in creating systemic change. Fractals are infinitely complicated spirals which can be ubiquitous all through creation—from crops to planets. This fractal sample is powerfully pertinent in co-creating an equitable, simply, and sustainable eco-world.
That’s, as brown observes: What we follow on the smallest scale units the patterns for bigger programs. What this fractally means when it comes to social work is that spotlight to our personal self-care spirals into our work. Then, fractally, this spiral impacts the bigger eco-world. These fractals of life imply that the sustainability of large-scale change is rooted within the sustainability of the occupation, which is interdependent with the person practitioner’s well-being. It’s simply fractal!
Leaving No One Behind
The 2021 theme for World Social Work Day was Ubuntu—I’m as a result of we’re. As we emphasised in our 2021 post, the collective “we” is comprised of people. The interconnectedness of the collective (ubuntu) is strongest and efficient when each “I” within the interconnection is, in flip, related to ourselves in wholesome and caring methods. Partaking in a single’s personal self-care is maybe essentially the most speedy, essential, fractal approach to contribute to a brand new eco-world that’s resilient, caring, and sustainable.
On this annual World Social Work Day (and every single day), let’s have fun the contributions and commitments of our beloved occupation. Let’s decide to a imaginative and prescient and plan of motion that builds a simply world and sustains the planet. Let’s additionally honor the humanity of the people finishing up this laudable occupation.
In co-building a brand new eco-social world, think about the care essential to maintain the people tasked with the “exhausting work and diligence.” Too typically on this work, the practitioner’s personal well-being is sacrificed for the purported higher good. Consideration to the social employee’s personal human-ness is forgotten within the constructing course of. Missing this foundational consideration, the method shouldn’t be sustainable nor humane.
Leaving nobody behind means emphasizing that each social employee is anyone and, fractally, everyone. Leaving nobody behind requires a imaginative and prescient and motion plan that encompasses practitioners—each as a part of the work and as human beings in our personal rights. Leaving nobody behind compels taking self-care seriously, as an important greatest follow in co-building a brand new eco-social world.
Dr. Erlene Grise-Owens, EdD, LCSW, MSW, MRE, is a Associate in The Wellness Group, ETC. This LLC gives analysis, coaching, and session for organizational wellness and practitioner well-being. Dr. Grise-Owens is lead editor of The A-to-Z Self-Care Handbook for Social Staff and Different Serving to Professionals. As a former college member and graduate program director, she and a small (however mighty!) group of colleagues carried out an initiative to advertise self-care as a part of the social work training curriculum. Beforehand, she served in scientific and administrative roles.
Dr. J. Jay Miller, PhD, MSW, CSW, is the Dean, Dorothy A. Miller Analysis Professor in Social Work Training, and Director of the Self-Care Lab within the Faculty of Social Work on the College of Kentucky. You possibly can comply with his work by way of Twitter @DrJayMiller1.
