Social Justice: Social Work's Organizing Value

Abstract

By virtue of the authority delegated to me, I confer upon you the degree of Master of Arts (in Social Service Administration), and I express the hope that your work will promote the welfare of individuals and the achievement of a socially just society. With these words--for nearly 100 years--the President of the University of Chicago has conferred the social work master's degree and launched the careers of new graduates. This mandate to social work graduates expresses the essential significance of the social work profession and eloquently articulates our inherited challenge. Executive Director of NASW, Elizabeth J. Clark echoed this challenge when she organized both the Social Work Congress and the Public Education Campaign designed to celebrate the past and look to the future as part of the 50th anniversary of the Association (Clark, 2004). She articulated our essential commitment to social and economic justice by noting that there are those who would like the rest of America to forget that there continues to be much suffering in this great country of ours. They would also like people to forget that individuals of all socioeconomic levels--our families, friends, coworkers and neighbors--increasingly need help in navigating our country's cumbersome and inadequate social support system ... (We must) remind our nation and its leaders about how the social work profession helped make the United States a compassionate world leader in the last century and that social workers continue to advocate for social justice and provide necessary services for all citizens. Our ultimate goal is to reposition social workers as critical contributors, not just value-added resources, in the new millennium (p. 10) Social and economic justice is the organizing value for the social work profession. It is the basis of our rich tradition and provides new and diverse directions for our future. Social workers were among the early architects of our social welfare system and remain active advocates for policies and programs that preserve and promote the health and well-being of all people. Social workers are trained to understand the political, economic, and social factors that shape the development of social programs and the work we do to implement them. Today, social workers are on the forefront in developing innovative policies and practices in critically important and diverse areas such as the reduction of racial disparities in health and child welfare, end-of-life care, home of relative care, youths aging out of foster care, death sentence mediation, and post-prison reintegration. Identifying that social and economic justice is the organizing value of our profession is essential to our future, to our capacity to survive and thrive as a profession. As is true with all professions, our mission and interests overlap with others: family therapists, teachers, probation officers, nurses, public policy generalists, clinical psychologists, ministers, and physicians. …