On Integrity • SJS

I’ve been considering so much about integrity these days. It’s my favourite of social work’s six core values, maybe as a result of it’s the most all-encompassing. The phrase can characterize honesty, competence, kindness, and morality. For a social employee, having integrity means selling social justice and common well-being in your service of numerous communities.

For a political social worker, this will appear and feel extra difficult. As an alternative of being out within the subject, assembly folks the place they’re, offering direct providers, we gown up in our fits and spend our days speaking to different folks in fits about how you can clear up the issues that different social employees are assembly head-on. Particularly within the Texas House of Representatives, selling social justice can really feel like repeatedly operating right into a brick wall.

Nearly 200 people died due to February’s winter storm, and the Home has to date prioritized proscribing the place state company leaders could reside and easing vitality firms’ monetary stress over offering direct help to impacted communities or regulating the industries that failed them (with out testimony from any events not financially concerned on this failed system, I’d add). Over 100 folks have been killed by Texas police in 2019, but the State Affairs committee voted out legislation that will punish cities for reforming and reallocating their police budgets to strengthen public security and belief. Local weather change is bringing more and more excessive and harmful climate to our state and the globe, but many legislators would select to divest from private companies that help decreasing our reliance on fossil fuels and sustaining greater effectivity requirements as an alternative of selling that follow.

On this place, I don’t have a lot energy to say what’s on my thoughts. This isn’t going to assist. This can make the issue worse. This can find yourself killing folks. Et cetera. The legislature is a difficult office by which to follow integrity. Social work values implore us to satisfy folks the place they’re, be taught with others, and admire the range of views that exist in any group, together with a group of state representatives identified for its excessive fiscal and social conservatism. On the identical time, we’ve got an obligation to advertise social justice and serve weak communities greater than we’re known as to attraction to the wants of those legislators. On this work, I’ve had to determine methods to speak that deliver my viewers in and don’t step on too many toes, even when each my head and coronary heart are telling me to talk extra boldly.

There appears to be a private model of this worth, integrity, that has to do with sticking to your rules and knowledgeable model that’s extra targeted on attaining targets, neither of which might I conclusively say is extra “morally” appropriate. It’s like that everlasting philosophical battle between prioritizing the means versus the ends. There’s completely an argument for each, and selecting one over the opposite appears to be extra a difficulty of private choice than ethical conviction, at the very least from my privileged viewpoint as somebody with few direct experiences with marginalization.

I believe in circles round issues like this on a regular basis. I stunned myself earlier this session with how simply I used to be capable of compromise my beliefs to put in writing a extra politically favorable invoice evaluation, figuring if I used to be extra direct, some legislators is likely to be turned off from our group totally based mostly on my private (fact-based, to my credit score) perspective. That’s how I justify it, anyway, and what are values if not extraordinarily private and ambiguous justifications for our actions? Do the legislators who make verifiably unfaithful statements with the purpose of pleasing their constituents exhibit any much less integrity than I do after I compromise my beliefs to appease the powers that be?

After all I want to suppose so, however wouldn’t everybody?

by Hannah Corridor, intern within the Texas Legislative Study Group

Initially posted from College of Houston Graduate College of Social Work’s Austin Legislative Internship Program. The School selects graduate MSW college students to intern on the Texas Legislature throughout its legislative session each two years. This publish was syndicated with permission from its authors.