Critical Community Practice Reflection

I wanted to take a second to kind of reflect on where my mind wandered after reading the assigned reading this week and after watching the assigned Ted Talks. I sometimes have hard time articulating my thoughts verbally which is why I’m more of an on observer and internal processor than talker or writer. Bear with me.

Truth be told, before this class I have never really put much thought into community work or critical community practice. Ive always kept my case management or crisis work in a bubble and thought, “Yeah community work, Im in the community, working with people to connect to their community, helping them get what they rightfully need and deserve...boom community work”. I’m embarrassed to admit, sure I’ve been doing some sort of community work, but not the type of critical community practice we are tackling in class. I have failed to look at a much bigger picture and equate social work to more than just therapy, coping skill, lets meet your needs so you are somewhat grounded type stuff. I started to wonder, how did I miss such a large realm of important social work? How am I not able to pull from my brain what critical community practice would even enjoy or be passionate about doing if community social work was the only sort of social work that was left? Where would I begin? This week’s reading focused a lot on supporting the oppressed in finding their voice and liberation, and if you want to see the change be the change.....and in the case of the Ted Talk changing whole communities over the weekend. How would I know how to do this? I have a hard time even conceptualizing where I would start. I wanted to do something different with my thoughts this week and poke around to see if I was in the minority of being out of the loop in critical Community practice and its application.

I decided to poke around the inter-webs to see if there were any stats or anything I could read showing how many people actually graduate with a MSW or some sort of social work degree and go on to do community work. I found information that made me feel a little better about being oblivious.  Interestingly, I found some information from a survey that was conducted in 2018 of 1400 MSW students and 300 BSW showing what they went on to do for a job in the social work field. It was reported that roughly 82 percent did some type of micro work- therapy, family, group work, 5.3 percent with communities, 1.0 worked in higher education/other. That’s a huge gap. Another interesting tidbit I found was social workers working with communities made up the minority in the social work field and, as of 2020, less than approx 20 percent where enrolled in a MSW macro-practice. Because people pursue macro work less than micro, macro social workers tend to feel underprepared in their education, under represented, and not supported. 

That is some interesting information. My thought is, with community work being so important in social work, why isn’t it almost advertised as an option when thinking about what one might want to do in the social work field? This reminds me of how I often wonder why, as a child growing up, professions  like being a cop, a nurse, a doctor, teacher, or being in the military are the hard pushed professions, but not specializing in a trade...or social work. Is this lack of knowledge of the importance of critical community social work part of a similar systemic issue pushed on purpose with a hidden agenda (make it harder to support the oppressed and give them a voice), part of THE systemic issue, or it’s own issue. OR is it an educational issue since we have seen and examined a lot of curriculum that was put together by those who think they know what others need to know (usually white men at the top who tend to have no idea what they are talking about )?

Comments

  1. Paula GerstenblattFebruary 17, 2021 at 2:52 PM

    You raise important points. When I started my MSW I wanted to be a therapist but quickly realized 50 minute hours were not for me. I need to get up and out. Build relationships and creative change, and even the work I did on grants and community assessments were more to my liking. Social work was once very much about community practice, macro or micro, in the streets organizing. The pendulum swung towards clinical therapy, diagnosis and treatment. It is still there; however, there is no need for a false divide in my view. We are all interconnected and working with people for better outcomes. Let's discuss this in class!

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