inSocialWork

“This is an incredible opportunity for a social worker to show up. And when we do, because of how we are uniquely trained, things get better. Because we do see the person and environment context, and we're not just thinking about remediation of symptoms if you will. We're looking at the structures that help perpetuate or create that person's struggle to begin with.”

"We are talking about a field that likes to tout its ethics and what we do, but our regulatory bodies are not adhering to our core values… This test is not doing anything but creating a massive, expensive barrier.”

“[Y]our story is important, and don't lose your story while you're doing your work. It is important no matter where you come from.”

“Intimate partner violence effects everyone. Even if people say, well, I've never been abused. I don't know anyone who has been abused. You have. You might just not know, because the person hasn't told you. Maybe you haven't presented yourself as a safe person to go to. […] it’s something that affects our whole society financially, economically, socially, all that. So, it is affecting all of us.”

“And so power is the ability to act. And most people, middle income, working income, lower income, don't have the ability to act in the public arena. So, question, you know, how do you get power? […] the only two ways to get it is you can organize people, then you can deliver with a focus, consistently and persistently. I said and consistently and persistently because you can't just do it once.”

“It is a scary word, palliative care. But if you ask me, it's just really the best approach to care because it's patient and family focused.”

"[I]f we're talking about why do we need to decolonize schools of social work, we are increasingly teaching future social workers to help our clients put Band-Aids on their situations, right, to advocate for them to deal with these oppressive systems and structures that they live in, right? Where is the advocacy for dismantling these harmful systems of oppression beyond voting? You know, how can we get social work to actually focus on dismantling these systems of oppression instead of helping our clients cope with them? That's really the question.”

“We have to think about the aspect of social work that includes mobilization, organization, and access. For so long in social work we have been very much in the room, present with our client.... [W]e're helping them individually, I think social work[ers] felt like they were reaching the goal of the field. But the field is a social field. It's about impacting and changing society. And in order to impact and change society, we have to be a collective. We have to organize. We have to work together. Mobilize. [...] Part of that is being politically intelligent. Having political will.”

– Mery Diaz

“Talk therapy is all about the verbal language. But what if you don’t have the verbal language?... That’s why movement is so important, because it let’s you unpack… [and] describe how it feels in your body.”

“I don’t disparage the really important, gifted clinical work… but the danger of understanding social work interventions as clinical and individual is that… We wind up trying to fix people, instead of trying to fix systems that box them often into utterly unworkable problems.”