Category: Professional Mission & Reform
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Advocacy Should Explain Funding Choices Without Ranking Human Worth
When social workers advocate for an organization, they often have to explain why it should receive money that could support another urgent need. That responsibility requires more than a moving account of suffering. It requires an argument about what a particular allocation can accomplish, who will benefit, and what happens to people whose needs remain…
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Food, Shelter, and Therapy: Social Work’s Misplaced Priorities
A person worried about the next meal or tonight’s sleeping arrangement may also need mental health treatment. The failure of a service system is not that it offers therapy, but that it can offer therapy more readily than a practical answer to hunger, unsafe housing, or an interrupted income. This final article in The Social…
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When the Problem Is Systemic: Race, Indigenous Traditions, and the Limits of Individual Therapy
When a person experiences discrimination, displacement, or insecurity, an intervention can help them cope while leaving the source of harm untouched. Social work must be willing to ask whether its response changes the conditions of suffering or merely asks the person suffering to accommodate them. This second article in The Social Work Reformer’s series examines…
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How Psychotherapy Became a Center of Social Work, and What That Shift Can Leave Behind
Social work should be able to relieve emotional suffering and help change the conditions producing it. The danger arises when the profession’s educational priorities, career incentives, and available jobs make treatment of individuals more attainable than sustained work on housing, income, services, and community power. This first article in The Social Work Reformer’s three part…
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An Encampment Is Not Someone Else’s Caseload: Social Work Must Reclaim Street-Level Housing Practice
The South Seattle encampment now spreading across several acres is a picture of institutional surrender. It is also a warning to social work. Neighbors report trash, needles, tree clearing, violence, and an informal market. People living at the site describe a need for housing, recovery support, and protection from winter weather. The city says it…
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Social Work Does Not Have to Own Every Form of Helping
Social workers are often described as the people who do everything nobody else will do. They counsel families, respond to crises, navigate benefits, advocate in schools, support patients, organize communities, investigate abuse, help people find housing, supervise programs, interpret policy, and repair failures created elsewhere in government. The description is intended as praise. It is…
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New York’s Missing BSW License: A Degree Without a Professional Home
August 2026 New York tells bachelor’s-level social-work graduates something unusually revealing about the profession. A BSW graduate may perform many social-work functions under supervision, but the state will not issue that graduate a social-work license. New York’s Office of the Professions recognizes only the Licensed Master Social Worker and the Licensed Clinical Social Worker. Its…
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Social Work Put All Its Eggs in the Therapy Basket. Now What?
We Devalued the BSW For decades, social work has increasingly organized its professional identity around the MSW, clinical licensure and psychotherapy. In doing so, we have allowed something remarkable to happen: the bachelor’s degree bearing the actual name of our profession has become insufficient for social work licensure in jurisdictions such as New York. Think…
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Launching The Social Work Reformer
More than three decades ago, Harry Specht and Mark E. Courtney published Unfaithful Angels: How Social Work Has Abandoned Its Mission. Their central argument was deliberately provocative: social work was drifting away from its historic responsibility to poor and vulnerable communities and increasingly embracing psychotherapy, private practice, and individualized solutions to problems that are often…