Social Work: A Dirty Word?

Hi Charles,

I remember that just one we used the parable of loaves and fishes to convey how wealth could circulate in the community rather than being spent and gone.

We've realised however, from the start that in many scenarios there will be an immediate need. Many of P-CED's strategy plans have included an element of social work. Most recently, in acknowledging that major charities are better prepared to tackle such immediate issues, such as rehabilitation of children in institutiol care, for example.

In day to day practice, we often find a need to just hand out help, either financial or in volunteering.

So yes, these are complementary.

We are after all, social beings who may well volunteer or give without reference or thought to our social enterprise activities and the greatest part of what is considered social work is invisible.

Here's an anecdote to illustrate this invisibility. 20 years after my grandmother passed away, I discovered her real name. To me, she'd always been Alice. She's lived in a rural mining community, where one was tagged for life with a nickname, often in gentle mocking affection.

Apparently, though she'd had 6 of her own children she'd spent so much time helping out everyone else, they'd given her the name of the social worker, employed by the county, which was Alice.

According to the NY Times, we may be wired for it, from birth.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/science/01human.html

Jeff




              

That's a lovely story about your grandmother, Jeff -- and you're right, we may help out in ways that aren't directly part of our focus as "social entrepreneurs".

I guess the reason this topic initially appealed to me, though, is because of the question "Is social work becoming a dirty word?" -- which hints at there being something not quite right, an unease, a fold in the fabric that we could recognize, tackle, try to smooth out.

Are there kinds of organized helping that have somehow acquired a rep for being dingy and unproductive?

And if so, where should we go from here?

Perhaps Charles, at least unproductive, when it seems that there's so little communication across the non-profit/profit-for-purpose membrane.

Our work may have opened up opportunity for some of these. For example, the John Smith Fellowship presumably unaware that the door to their democracy building in Ukraine, was opened by our strategy paper. It was supplied at our cost and considerable personal risk for the author.

As you may know, we've been applying our advocacy for social purpose business in practical ways for a decade, the last 5 in the UK. Yet there are advocates in out own country who offer this as a future aspiration. In this presentation the social innovation fund and the concept of social impact investment are mentioned. We can offer examples of both, with results to prove that they will work. Not invented here - yet, parhaps?

http://www.ted.com/talks/ge[…]ng_in_a_better_world_1.html

One of the interesting things that is occurring in the evolution of this filed is that there are many notions as to what is involved in the notion of social entrepreneurship (as well as a number of debates as to what it should be called, but that’s another topic).
It seems to me that there are three main subjects – Innovative approaches to solving social problems, new ways of thinking about how to fund those approaches, and better ways to run the organizations that provide the service. What is more interesting (and relevant to this thread) is that the three camps tend to operate in isolation. If you talk to the folks who are concerned about how to fund, the issue of program evaluation rarely makes it to the table. Talk to the pioneer of social change, and we loose track of how to pay for it (or even worse – assume that it will be through grants and gifts just like always). And the operational folks? Well, let’s just say that actuaries and undertakers are more popular at parties than someone who gets excited about more effective and efficient operations in the social sector.
So, fish or fishing becomes just one of several questions that need to be answered. Yes, it is certainly one worth raising. And without a doubt (at least in my head) the traditional social work model is geared more toward fish and less toward fishing (although, as in the story of the starfish on the beach, it does make a difference to the individual starfish). What’s more important to me is that we recognize which one we are doing, and that we find ways to free whatever good work is under way. To free it from the constraints of begging to be funded. To free it from the constraints of not holding the worker accountable and of not paying them a decent wage just because they are in social work.
Then, you are free to either fish or teach fishing (and even free to call it whatever you want), knowing that you are doing good and doing well.

Thanks, Jim.

It seems to me that what you are describing is like one tide reaching three adjacent beaches: solutions, funding, and organization. In each of those areas, we have people whose interests and values call for more than monetary gain, whose thinking is innovative, and whose commitment is enthusiastic.

And they may be like three "gears" that are not preset to function smoothly together. If I was better at bicycles, I'd know how to describe this better, but it's my sense that at each of the interfaces, there can be(sometimes disastrous) slippage -- so that each of them would be worth its own conversation here on the Edge>

It's almost notorious that solutions-folk are sometimes unsuited to the organizational side of things, for instance, which is why the transition from the creative/quirky founder to a more stable management team is often tricky. And insight doesn't necessarily fit easily with funding requirements, either.

So we need to examine the problems at each of the three interfaces -- and we also need to imagine a system or series of approaches that will somehow coordinate these three, so that the three sets of gears work smoothly together.

Much to ponder here...

Charles, One observation I make in reading some of the responses to proposed Social Innovation Fund, is that the emphasis seems to be on large nonprofit organisations and a substantial hurdle for the fund matching requirement. I read it was $5 million.

At the same time, I note the general movement of social enterprise toward the for-profit models, as Tommy Hutchinson relates in his article which criticises billionaire Richard Branson on his non-profit stance. A man weho last year at Davos, called on business to focus more on social problems.

http://www.alliancemagazine.org/node/3079

Likewise in the UK we have a Social Enterprise Fund for the NHS, exclusively for non-profit funding.

Our Prime Minister Gordon Brown has called on business for social investment "showcases". That I fear, is about all it will come to.

On the other hand, we have one of his minister, Tessa Jowell calling for the deployment of cooperatives in service delivery, seemingly unaware that cooperatives are a large part of the social enterprise sector, for which they already claim to have a policy of support.

Overall there appears to be no coherent policy as government and opposition alike grasp blindly at "social enterprise" as a panacea, while seemingly having little understanding of it.

Most of us are left bewildered, wondering why so much talk translates to such little support and action.

Jeff


       

So:

I personally don't know the system, Jeff, so I am thrown back on Donella Meadows essay on "Places to Intervene". Where can you get leverage that will shift the system?

http://www.sustainer.org/pubs/Leverage_Points.pdf

I didn't mean ton stifle conversation with that response, Jeff -- I just don't know my way around British bureaucracy... and when I find frustration with a system, meadows is the person to whom I'd turn for useful insight. So I hoped you might find her categories a helpful way to describing where the disconnects are, and what can bet be done to connect them...

Imagine what a non-profit distributing network hub could do, if it were also a search engine which concentrated only on listing 'Ethical & Environmental', AND, if this were a co-op...?! - It could quite easily support the Third Sector via commissions earned through the hub, and through 'The Ark Portal of Innovations" - a window to sustainable innovation which everyone could access everywhere, and submit their own design concept/s, with first option to purchase given to those listed in the Ethical & Environmental directory.

I have put proposals together, my local MP, Norman Lamb (whose father started the climate research centre at the UEA), passed my draft articles on to Lord Hunt OBE - described as 'an estimable project' in his covering letter. Lord Hunt passed the documents to Dan Norris, MP for DEFRA - who stonewalled us.

If we have a commercially viable income generator, do we need governmental approval now that governments themselves have accepted the need for sustainability? - We just need to form a cohesive and inclusive network system ourselves.

As you also annotate feelings of bewilderment at the lack of support and action, I am taking the liberty of pasting a brief of my full report, based on my study of open sourced researched material on exclusion, poverty, deprivation, housing need, sustainability, and with proposals compliant with Agenda 21, Brundtland Report, Reap Report SEI (+ more):

Earth - Financial or Life Asset?

Global Ark Projects is a not-for-profit networking hub, which aims to place funds where they are needed to feed a grassroots response to global environmental change.

It has been formed by people, for people, and especially for children everywhere.

It supports a holistic approach to salvaging our planet home through the exchange of knowledge.

Linda Beamish
Design Consultant, Eco-Designs co uk
and Founder/Chair of www.GlobalArkProjects.com

Where are we?

In spite of Agenda 21, the Brundtland Report 1987, Stockholm 1972, and a raft of environmental and ecological analyses from as far back as the 1950’s and 60’s, nothing has been completely or comprehensively orchestrated to respond to or prevent the suffering of human beings due to climate change. Political responses offer only top-down proposals which are failing to involve the majority of people on this planet.

As a caring parent, trying to provide my children with the opportunity of ‘A’ tomorrow, I know we all have to work together now, to try to rebalance this planet. But I am fortunate. What about all those who have no access to the resources needed to help their own children, now and in the future?

This is not about changing the shopping trends of those who care. We will be directory with a social conscience, generating income through cooperative links; through non-profit distribution supporting Earth regeneration and irrigation, and by supporting people to reclaim affordable and sustainable lives in a rebalanced environment.

We need to further raise awareness of the problems we face in this World and would ask to be introduced to people who care as much as you. What we are proposing requires seed capital to begin, for example, advertising and forging links with a search engine provider. Once operational our project will have a commercially viable income generator for its intended work.

We aim to establish restorative, ecological, sustainable community living projects, providing affordable homes to people who need them most, and who are prepared to work on innovative, restoration and land management programmes and then share their knowledge with others.

Comprehensive, inclusive and cooperative links are proposed, connecting individuals, families and organisations through a virtual hub which will be firmly rooted set at community level where it is needed the most, and where urgent action is needed for maximum effect and benefit for the Earth.

As an evolutionary concept; if the human species were a plant, would it really grow from its flowering head down to its roots? With over 80% of the human plant as its root system, it was inadvisable to remove the Earth’s nutrients from the networking base on which all its life was dependant. This planet has been and is being raped of its resources.

A grass-roots system is needed – a most appropriate term - to spread across all waste and dry land in order to begin healing our planet. As single blades of grass in a desert, we are scorched, but as an interconnected, comprehensive and cooperatively linked network, we can turn the desert green.

We reject corporate and political solutions which promise much and deliver little as our climate changes. We believe that change must begin at the roots – at the level of each individual human being. It is a web of such people, their ideas, projects, energy and synergy that our project is all about. Not power to the people, but powered by the people.

What is Global Ark?

The concept of Global Ark was initiated by a feasibility study to form a sustainable community living project in Norfolk, which continues to be under development. During this study it was noted that a Yale University project has been asking why so few people are living sustainably.

We all know, or think we know, about climate change, and many believe that the State recognises the issues and the need to live sustainably. However, those who are trying to prepare plans and proposals for ecological buildings and sustainable community living projects (SCLPs) which can only be of environmental benefit, still encounter difficulties negotiating innovative and, sometimes, unusual proposals through the traditional consent processes in this country.

Parents the whole planet over are aware through theory or daily reality of the likely impact of climate change for the future of their children, and the millions suffering and dying due to the effects of climate change are already having their ‘Right to Life’ taken away from them.

The global commercial emphasis on profitability is itself unsustainable, and untenable for the planet’s population. Minimising investments and maximising profit whilst seeing nature as an industrial resource is creating an imbalance which we will find hard, if not impossible to rectify.

Although United Nations Agenda 21, 1992, encourages the cooperation and inclusive policies which set to empower those suffering exclusion and deprivation, with specific reference to the role of women in sustainable community projects, the search to date for grant aid to establish Global Ark is proving difficult. How do you establish a track record in order to attract funds when you need funds to establish a track record?

Global Ark and its projects aim to work below the level of the political or corporate – at the individual or small group level. We present no threat to the aims of global idealists, just seek the opportunity to connect those of a like mind around the world who have something to give and who wish to learn from others about living sustainably, and re-learning the skills necessary to reduce our impact on the Earth.

It is the individual multiplied by millions that will save this planet. It is Global Ark’s aim that we play a part in bringing about the networking information exchange culture that will allow this to happen.

Our concept of rural and urban regenerative, sustainable community living projects offers a new model for the future. It is about small scale, individualistic and ecological living with an opportunity to grow through knowledge exchange. We aim to connect the rural and urban with the indigenous. We will use technology – Pandora’s box is open – but to heal, not exploit.

Once financially seeded and established, Global Ark Projects will generate the income needed through the Ark’s environmental and ethical directory and we will redistribute net profits to, amongst other objects:
Form further restorative, self-sustainable community living projects - globally
Support ‘water for all’ projects
Support ‘education for all’ projects
Support other third-sector organisations, charities and other NPDs
Fund solar and wave powered desalination plants, feasibly providing water wherever possible to:
Give a regular supply of clean drinking water to those in need
Irrigate as much of the 41% total landmass currently classified as dryland
Provide local industry where it is needed most, through sales of refined minerals extracted in desalination (table salt to lithium - itself needed for storage of solar energy)
 
The work of re-greening our planet incrementally will then have begun.

What now?

The answer lies with you.

Consensually:

If you agree, please join us and forward:

Web Address:
 http://www.globalarkprojects.com 

If you are able to help us in any way, please
Email:
info@globalarkprojects.com 



N.B. This document is open for your own use to recopy or print without need to ask for copyright for all those in agreement with the ideas, goal and statement of this document, but the original concept is retained by Global Ark Projects.

This document and its concept must not be used for personal, individual, professional, company, corporate or any governing body's profit, gain or other. Please ensure that accreditation remains with www.globalarkprojects.com, it must not be claimed as your own, and all intellectual property rights are retained by the originator, and protected by and for individual/s forming the original consensual document as shown via email or web-space, and in entirety as referenced in the full report's study of findings as shown on our website/s.  

Hi Linda:

That's a very useful summary of you work, and I'm also of the opinion that local aka grassroots approaches to sustainability will have a significant role to play in any viable solution to current problems.

I'm wondering whether you're aware of the work of the strategic thinker John Robb -- he wrote *Brave New War* -- whose upcoming book is devoted to sustainability?

There's an early post of his on the topic at his Global Guerrillas blog here:

http://globalguerrillas.typepad.com/[…]/the-resilient-c.html

Hi Linda,

I'm also for the idea of a social purpose search engine. In fact, I think I've even mentioned it here myself in the past. As an organisation which advocates for the development of localized people-centered economics on a global basis, we've been active overseas.

We started off with a white paper in fact prescribing an economic model which applied information access to a more inclusive form of capitalism. As an IT business, we render profit, or more accurately the profit we don't make, to support out overseas endeavours.

One of the people you may be interested in linking up with is Karen Maskell of Pledging for Change who's been quite active in the area of creating an exchange for social organisations. Most attempts to do something in this areas seem to come to nothing.

We actually have a track record, you'd be forgiven for not knowing about it. We've been creating impact in Eastern Europe for 10 years now, since our founder self funded his work on sourcing a development initiative in Russia.

I'll connect "offine" certainly, but in the meantime here's a potted history of our advocacy for digital empowerment and inclusive economics.

http://people-centered.net/About.aspx

Regards,

Jeff
       

       

Do you assume the right to "give that man a fish", or that that man might "need to be taught how to fish" or to consider the need to "give the fish a chance"?
Becoming a social entrepreneur for many is indeed based in part on our own life experience, and our understanding of need which our conscience cannot ignore.
But when considering fishing, would it not be better to ask whether someone likes fish before you give 'him' one?
The fact that the man may not have a fish, could be because he does not like fish - 'he' might not need to be taught how to fish... and especially now, there is the potent that there are NO fish!
Would a better approach not be to engage in discussion with "that man", and ask him what he might actually need?
Assuming a lack of fish, or a lack of knowledge, or even that there are any fish, is based upon the fact that one is a 'giver' and one is a 'receiver'.
For true empowerment and equal opportunity, everyone would need to fish together, have a rod, line, hook and bait... otherwise everyone without the equipment would be dependant upon those with it, to notice them standing hungry on the bank of the river, and hope to be 'thrown' a fish. Working with vast fishing trawlers with small gauge nets, in order to feed millions of starving people, is dangerous for the species of all fish.
Assuming prior knowledge can be as dangerous for "the man", as it is for "the fish".
Surely as social entrepreneurs we need to ask what people need in order to live self-sustainably, and then help to facilitate and enable that opportunity.

Hello again, Linda.

From my personal POV, life is a complex web never completely captured in words, and my preference would be to consider the interests of the hydrologic cycle, watershed, streams and ponds, fishes, waterboatmen, birds, fishermen, worms, tiers of dry flies, the entire complex of ecosystems... but that's the poet's-eye-view. So yes, I am in favor of expanding the catch / learn to fish metaphor to align it with the real-world energy exchanges of the tao...

*

As to your comment "we need to ask what people need in order to live self-sustainably"... There's a tricky issue that arises as to whether human beings can ask for what they "really need" since their perceived needs may themselves be the result of faulty assumptions -- as inn the case of people who don't realize that drinking water downstream from their own waste is hazardout to their health. But yes, in general, we should not (in my opinion) be cavalierly imposing our own insights on those of others. With significant qualifications, as yet undetermined.

Hi Charles, good to see you again.

Is "social work" being given a bad image? In the past decade, with so many people focusing on "results" and "business-type" approaches, it may be that the often fuzzy, hard to define benefits of social workers are less valued. To me, that's a mistake. In the end, we're working with people, and the empathy and understanding and commitment the social worker might bring to his/her role is critically important.

When I did research in starting the Tutor/Mentor Conection in 1992-3 I found this report: http://www.chapinhall.org/[…]/children-families-and-communities

The report describes in detail the major elements of a reconfigured system of primary supports and social services. Primary supports would be those activities that might help a youth "learn to fish" and thus prevent him/her from crossing into a life circumstance where he/she or his family might need social services to help mitigate or "fix" the problem.

I've been working to build this system of primary supports for the past 16 years. Last week I hosted a briefing for a team of leaders from Indiana (I'm in Illinois). At the end of the meeting one leader said "You're a social worker" as a complement to me for what I'm trying to do.

I think the key word in this conversation is "work". We don't get any solution to any problem, without lots of time, and effort spent understanding a problem, or situation, then framing responses, then finding resources, then applying those resources over and over for a long time. This is work.

In many cases I think the people who are traditional social workers, are out in the field trying to solve the problems of their clients, with too few resources and too few people helping them. It's "hero" type work, yet now well appreciated, or well supported.

Social entrepreneurs are often operating in the same circumstances, trying to innovate a new service, or a new solutions, with too little support.

Maybe in 2010 more people in each of these sectors will connect and learn from each other, and innovate ways to expand the help received from a growing number of people who don't live in poverty or in need of the help of social workers or entrepreneurs.

As always, Daniel, it's a pleasure to read you.

I just read an amazing short book put out by the Sierra Club -- Thomas Berry's *Creative Energy*. It's a beautifully crafted work "bearing witness for the earth" as Berry's subtitle puts it, and it manages to show the need for a transformative approach to the global human future without once attacking and denigrating those most deeply implicated in the industrial and commercial system which, he feels, we need to gradually refurnish or refurbish in such a way as to avoid some of its catastrophic runaway feedback loops.

Putting it simply, he's in solidarity with those he disagrees with -- and the result is that he can ear them, and they can hear him, without the usual intervening ego-defense mechanisms being called needlessly amplified.

I think your post above exemplifies the same sensibility, and I would argue that it this approach is one of the great and fundamental cornerstones of real change.

Sorry to join the conversation late I've been away, anyway a while ago Terry mentioned MBA courses as being poisonous, or with an a skewed worldview where social work is indeed invisible. The implications for everyone else are loud and clear, it's monetary gain that matters most and anything that isn't making money doesn't matter (a cultural delusion indoctrinated into us from the 'bling bling' flashy 1980's I'm sure.)

What's interesting is what's set to change, when it's proven without a shadow of a doubt, that light matters more than matter - shifting what matters most to people (we'll have science to thank for this advancement in human evolution.) So it will be a natural coarse that, with initiative and accountability, business will focus more on social problems than showcases. I like Linda's plant analogy of shifting the root system, and your various metaphors Charles.

With that, the other dirty word is bureaucracy (in social work) which defends the status quo long past the time the quo lost it's status. With the unease of everyone working in isolation, bureaucracy as a way of being can be summed up in the words of Roald Dahl's Dirty's Beasts " I had a powerful hunch that he might have me for his lunch and so because I feared the worst, I thought I'd better eat him first."

The great thing about social work is that it cares, so it's flexible right?

Hi Jo:

Good to have you with us again. I have little more to add, except lol at "long past the time the quo lost it's status".

I meant Roald Dahl's Dirty Beasts, I really should check typo's before I hit send, never mind. I just wanted to say one other thing too, you know, about your question can we do one without the other?

I like what Thomas Berry said, creative energy as a force is in continuous relationship with form. He's right about rethinking what it means to be human in order to break the hold industrial civilization has on us, (which social work has to pick up the pieces in) I like what he says about 'this generation's Great Work, as a transformative effort to change human-Earth relations.' In challenging the dualism, can we do one without the other? What do you think he means by cultural therapy?

You know, how human nature is essentially an animal nature, and the only thing that sets us apart from others in the animal kingdom is consciousness, it clearly is therefore the ultimate reality in bridging the human/Earth relation as well as being responsible for shifting perception, relationships and social transformation. I love Thomas Berry's The Sacred Universe he's right about the spirituality of the earth.

Hey Daniel, I like how you think about the requirements of children's primary needs before the state has to intervene. Kudos for building a system to provide support for them.

Your colleague Joe highlighted something that many people address, and in my view the creative tension between debates over approaches for social transformation that try to address either short-term, (perhaps) symptoms and longer-term, (perhaps) root causes (or, in some cases, address both) is a fruitful one unlikely to be resolved in the abstract, outside of a particular issue or context. On the issue of social work in particular, let's not over-homogenize. There have long been a range of competing currents within social work over those that view certain social problems as ones of individuals and are more about social control and one kind of therapeutic approach that is for people to accept their conditions of life, and those that view them as produced by exploitative social relations and view social workers as partners in social transformation (ie, http://www.radical.org.uk/barefoot/), or various approaches of critical (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Critical_social_work) or radical social work.

I agree John, for societal development, a fundamental rethink of priorities is urgently needed - if social work is to survive in hostile climates (to help stop the spread of societal viruses) as problems often arise out of competing currents - it's about breaking out of old habits. At the current rate, transformative social change is another l00 years away, so SE doesn't need to work in the system, it needs to work on the system.

Hi Charles,

Thank you for this excellent discussion on the appropriate kind of social work. Do we hand a man a fish so that he can eat today? Or do we institute classes teaching him how to fish for himself? But what if his children are going hungry while he's learning to fish? Or what if he's unable to attend classes because he's suffering from disease, resulting from malnutrition?

Ultimately, I don't think there's one right answer, or one kind of social work that is always most appropriate. Some populations of poverty need direct aid to simply eat. Others can eat, but need direct investment, and donations, to attain an education and solid healthcare. On the next level, many can receive microfinance investments to start a business. Furthering the process, a person formerly in steep poverty can attain solid job training and employment opportunities. Which then leads to the developing a middle class: A Middle Class that can care about voting, health, education and being a participatory citizen caring not only about survival, but also contributing to the growth and positive development of their community.
 
However, this could take generations; this trajectory does not happen rapid fire in every person’s life. We need it all: direct aid, for-profit investment and philanthropy — invested at different times, and different ways, across different life times, before we can get out of the woods of poverty.

Sincerely,
Pamela Hawley
Founder and CEO
UniversalGiving

phawley@universalgiving.org
www.universalgiving.org

Living and Giving blog
www.pamelahawley.wordpress.com