Tag: social change

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Contemporary pou for an existential threat

A guest post by Kerstin Hagena, Alina Hagena and Luis Arevalo

“The era of procrastination, of half measures, of soothing and baffling expedients, of delays, is coming to its close. In its place, we are entering a period of consequences”

(Winston Churchill, 1936)

Kia ora koutou! 

Here we are again, the trio of social service professionals and animal rights activists encouraging conversation within the social service sector about the imminent danger climate change poses to tamariki and whānau. We believe the ANZASW Code of Ethics gives us the responsibility to pay more attention to this threat and have written about this before (2024, 2023, 2022).

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New Year’s revolutions

Kia ora koutou katoa

The following reflections from each and all of us at the RSW Collective are offered at the turn of a challenging and energising year for social work in Aotearoa New Zealand. We don’t pretend to speak for anyone else, but we do encourage critical imagination and action – together we can help shape a progressive future.

The social profession seeks to do more than bandage the victims of an unequal society; it needs to be a voice for social change. Critical social workers need to have a powerful voice in practice development, policy analysis and in wider politics. We have something to say about the genesis of social suffering and this involves more than administering evidence-based treatment to the poor.

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Social work and social change: thinking a way forward

Away from the daily grind of social work practice, in the lofty land of international definitions and professional bodies, social work is nominally aligned with the struggle against oppression and the pursuit of social justice. This identity claim is contradictory on at least two fronts. First, it is ideologically fudged in the sense that the nature of social justice and the conditions for establishing it are politically contested. Unsurprisingly, such umbrella definitions reflect a compromise position. International social work organisations have not – and they are not about to – condemn the injustices inherent to globalised capitalism (Gray & Webb, 2013).

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