The Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development started in 2010 when 3000 social work representatives and social development professionals came together to set the priorities for the profession until 2020. This significantly successful period of the Global Agenda has been an essential voice in proactively setting and fulfilling the Sustainable Developmental Goals, working towards more peaceful and just societies and strengthening the voice of the social work profession.
Now, the social work profession needs to examine new themes and processes to expand the Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development for the years 2020 to 2030. From IFSW, we are launching a consultation process, where your input is essential to build a robust and inclusive Global Agenda that meets the real needs of all people. The consultation period will end in July 2020.
Please make your contributions to the Global Agenda for Social Work and Social Development 2020 – 2030 by filling in the comments box at the bottom of this page.
To see the reports of the Global Agenda from 2010 to 2018 please visit the IFSW Bookstore where you can download the reports for free. Below is a video message from the IFSW President Silvana Martinez and Secretary-General Rory Truell providing some examples of the success of the Global Agenda and inviting all people interested in the development of social work to participate in the consultation process. The video is subtitled in both Spanish and English.
Comments Section
Please leave any comments on your proposed Global Agenda themes for 2020 to 2030 and any suggestions for how to integrate the themes across the decade which also allows the Global Agenda process to effectively respond to any unforeseen social issues that may arise.
I believe one thing Social Workers should be advocating for is LGBTQA+ human rights. There is many hate crimes happening around the world, targeting this community. We should enact more policies on how to educate the world on understanding and being sensible towards gender and sexual orientation diversity.
Bonjour Madame, Monsieur,
Je me permets de vous écrire suite à la prochaine journée mondiale sur le travail social.En effet, nous sommes une ONG et oeuvrons dans le domaine environnemental et social depuis 1994 en République Démocratique du Congo. Je suis la présidente et résidente en France suite à l’asile depuis 2011. La situation politique s’étant presque améliorée avec un nouveau régime, au mois de mars je descendrai à Kinshasa pour célébrer le mois de la Femme et plus particulièrement la journée mondiale du travailleur social.
Je suis trés intéressée sur votre plan décennal 2020 -2030 et compte y adhérer.
Notre Organisation décennera quelques symboles de mérite à quelques travailleurs sociaux et sollicitons votre autorisation pour utiliser votre logo .
Pour l’ONG CUCAFE, Mme Georgette BILONDA MPENDA
Regarding the strategies and content of the Agenda for 2020-2030 there are several issues which are succinctly suggested here:
1- Social workers work in front-line of social areas and because of that they own a valuable treasure of information and this lets them be significant parts of social policy, either in regional, national, and international levels. When discussing commonplace social issues such as poverty, violence, and addiction or international challenges like peace, migration, and even environmental issues, social workers are quite prepared to play a role in making proper social policy.
2- One of the most important things to promote status of a profession is to be reference of an area. Social workers are already reference of many things. However. even though they are typically involved in many fields, no particular concept is specifically undertaken by social workers to study and report over the world. Social health which is considered as a key pillar of new definitions of health is the best
option for social workers to focus so that other professionals and national as well as global bodies can utilize the outputs of their works. IFSW may collect information from all over the world by national associations and analyze them in order to make a universal conclusion and let others refer to that.
3- Violence is, with little doubt, the most significant issue around the globe. Family and social violence are so widely happening and obviously endanger peace for current and also next generation. Thus it seems reasonable to think that advocating peace and practicing against violence be a part of the Agenda for the oncoming decade.
4- Social observatory from local to international levels is an element of social responsibility in which social workers can be effectively involved with. Theoretically speaking, social workers have a significant role to play in policy making level. They are recognized as “change agents” as well. Social workers can take the responsibility of monitoring social change in societies and let the politicians as well as scientific persons trust on them.
5- Social work experience basically originate from education. Knowing that university curriculum is not the only way of education, it is important to review education strategies and contents in order to keep social workers up-to-dated and at the same time, encourage colleagues in any parts of the world make and use indigenous production of social work. The Agenda must take
practice standardization into account to ensure the best quality of social work in any cases.
6- On the other hand, social work won’t progress without learning from what ancestors have undergone. Therefore, it is wonderful if the Agenda can motivate national social work organizations to collect lesson learned and experiences of social work pioneers in any society
and translate them into global languages so that everybody else can benefit from them.
7- Undoubtedly, after more than 90 years, social work organizations are sufficiently matured to develop collaboratively research project with regard to social issues over the world. There are lots of similar examples in other area such as geography or politics in which the specialists, while keeping political considerations in mind, come together to operate in study or even practical projects partnered with UN agencies or otherwise.
8- As is already noticed in the process of the preparation, the Agenda has to make a place for IT- based practices and make social workers be quite ready to respond logically to IT-oriented concerns and dilemmas. It is hardly deniable that human societies in many places, if not all, lag behind the pace of IT development. For instance, working with people is not straightforward when the services are decided to be delivered in a virtual space. As such, many ethical and technical challenges are going to be raised in the years ahead that practitioners must make decisions about them.
9- IFSW and its sister organizations have consultation positions in global levels. However, they must try to strengthen the status to be an actual and more efficient player in decision making in the areas that social work is concerned with. We must think in the post-Agenda time that IFSW, for example, with millions of members that are individually hero in helping the most vulnerable people is a key respondent for UN when working on issues like poverty or violence which we claim we are specialists in them.
Thanks for all colleagues from all over the world who are participating to develop the Agenda..
Hassan Mousavi Chelak (DSW)- President of Iran Association of Social Workers and IFSW Ethics Commissionaire
Considering the human relationship as essential element in social, it is imperative that we are relieved of administrative tasks (which encroach on heavily accompanying times), and that we have the essential freedom to have the emergence of our creativity, the innovation and because we are the experts in our job with particular attention and a vigilance on phenomena in the presence and changes for an adaptation in simultaneous if we let them their means. People accompanied doesn’t deserve procedures of executing all orders. They deserve we deploy all of our skills to their service for a real co-construction.
Salve, sono un Assistente sociale della regione Sicilia, Italia. Credo che fra i futuri temi dell’agenda globale per l’assistenza sociale, sia importante dedicare alcuni punti all’importanza del lavoro sociale nel mondo, per spiegare chi sono e cosa fanno gli assistenti sociali, non soltanto come è nata la nostra professione, ma anche conoscere la sua evoluzione nel tempo rispetto alle nuove complessità, le nuove problematiche e le nuove sfide sociali. L’obiettivo dovrebbe essere quello di far capire che il nostro è un lavoro estremamente bello, se fatto con passione, amore e vocazione, dove la progettualità, adesso, è diventata effettivamente la chiave giusta per cercare di creare, valorizzare e recuperare realtà sociali virtuose, per fare rete e comunità. Un secondo tema da inserire nell’agenda, credo possa riguardare il tema del razzismo, che oggi purtroppo trova una pericolosa e ampia diffusione che deve essere bloccata senza nessuna esitazione, per una società pacifica, sicura e basata sull’uguaglianza; è un tema molto ampio capace di attirare a sé moltissime altre sfumature del sociale, per questo credo sia il più utile, il più doveroso ed il più urgente da affrontare.
Grazie per l’attenzione.
The Global Social Work Agenda – the next 10 years: Should these transformational changes be part of the 10y-year agenda?
Richard Ramsay, Professor Emeritus of Social Work, University of Calgary
The 2020 IFSW conference will finalize a global consultation process that will set the strategic priorities for the social work profession over the next decade. As stated in conference materials, “the strength of the social profession lies in its capacity to build participatory democracy, engage communities in their sustainable futures, and defend human rights.”
Transformational changes in the profession of social work, originally proposed at the 2004 conference to help social workers more fully participate in the process of reclaiming civil society, have yet to be discussed in a participatory context. They are proposed again for open discussion and debate on whether they are needed to help set the profession’s priorities for the third decade of the 21st century and a reminder that both IFSW (1928) and CASW (1926) will celebrate their 100th founding anniversaries in this decade.
Divided – Undivided Whole Worldviews
Bohm (1983) on wholeness provides an understanding of just how pervasive the divided whole view has been . . . “the whole weight of science was eventually put behind this analytical and fragmentary approach to reality”. Its legacy is still prevalent, witnessed by exclusionary distinctions between people (race, nation, family, profession, and so on) that often preclude members of these groups from working together for the common good.
1. As the social work profession was emerging in the 20th century, science was dominated by a “divided whole” worldview that held that all things exist as separate entities, independent in space and time. David Bohm, a well-known 20th-century physicist, documented the pervasiveness of this view in the Western world, over several centuries, to mean that the “the whole of reality is actually constituted of nothing but ‘atomic building blocks’, all working together more or less mechanically” (Bohm, 1983, p. 8). The legacy of this view has prevailed into the new millennium despite advances in the sciences that greatly limit this view of reality. Much of the world remains preoccupied with separateness, binary opposites/dualities and the need for exclusionary classifications of people (race, nationality, family, professions, and so on) that precludes members in these different groups from working together for the common good. Building on his own work and that of others, Bohm’s understanding of “undivided wholeness” reflects a worldview that all ‘entities’ are relational. This view is far more suited to social work than a divided whole view.
Social work needs to make this worldview transformation to move it beyond its historical, often unwitting, ties to mechanist metaphors and the high social value placed on independence.
Setting this transformation as a priority in the next decade will help the profession reinforce its commitment to holism, multidimensional perspectives, and a corresponding global social work understanding of synergy: “the behaviors of whole systems are unpredicted by the behavior of their parts taken separately [and the behavior of parts working together to achieve something neither could achieve on their own]” (Fuller, 1975, p. 13). In this context, the concept of empowering others would be understood as a two-way benefit and better described as a co-empowering exchange.
Entity-centered – Relationship-centered focus
Advances in 20th-century science found no building blocks or discrete units; only relationships. Social work claims to be relationship-centred with its focus on interactions and allegiance to co-empowerment in the professional-client relationship, but generally defaults to a person-centred claim in its public discourse.
2. The mechanical worldview contributed a building block approach to social functioning consisting of discrete entities. Everything became “something-centred,” and social work followed the trend as revealed by entity-centred methods: client-centred (Rogers, 1951), task-centred (Reid & Epstein, 1977), family-centred (Hartman & Laird, 1983), people-centred (Cox, 1998), and so forth. Yet new science discoveries have found no building blocks or discrete units; there are only relationships. Fuller (1975) conceptualized it nicely: The existence of self and otherness entities depends on their tensegrity relationships one to the other.
Social work’s claim to be relationship-centred, with its domain focus on interactions and to a strong allegiance with the co-empowerment attributes of the professional-client relationship is weak in having no clearly demonstrated model to implement this claim. With the aid of a holistic, tensegrity model, social workers can learn how to focus on the intangible (relationship-centred interactions) and work through the tangible (entity-centred person and environment targets). For social work to fully transform to a relationship-centred profession in the next decade, social workers need to be familiar with the relationship discoveries in quantum science and an understanding of tensegrity in several structural systems (e.g. body anatomy, bridge engineering, cosmic stability, social relationships).
Instead of remaining tied to the entity-centred legacy of a mechanical building block view, a new priority view will be fostered that is more akin to tensegrity principles and the web of “dancing relationships” between the constituent elements of a unified whole (Capra, 1996).
Individual – Collective Primacy
Complexity sciences have discovered the cosmic nature of co-evolution “where both large and small scales emerge as aspects of one totally interconnected system” Margulis (19..), whose once-controversial theory of symbiosis is now accepted, agrees “individual is an illusion”… it is “a cooperative venture” . . . [and] “will resolve the apparent conflict between individual freedom and collective need”.
3. Social work has mostly evolved on the core value belief that the individual is the primary concern of all societies. This is persistent despite its often claimed person-in-environment practice domain and primary focus on social interactions. The individual-centred belief is closely tied to the divided wholeness worldview This view underpins the traditional belief that global social work is primarily individual- or person-centred. Although interdependence, inherent in an undivided whole view, is often expressed in social work rhetoric,
there is little advocacy for a transformation that would ground social work to an interdependent-centred value that corresponds to the entity-relationship (tensegrity) structures of whole systems.
Setting this transformation as a next decade priority will allow 20th-century discoveries of the deep and reciprocal interconnectedness between “individual freedom and collective need” (Briggs and Peat, 1989, p. 165) to inform a fundamental change to the profession’s value base. Individuality at its roots would be understood to be “a cooperative venture”, allowing the individual-collective to become the primary concern of all societies.
Equilibrium – Far-From-Equilibrium Functioning
Wheatley (1999) says “equilibrium is neither the goal nor the fate of living systems, simply because as open systems they are partners with their environment”. Prigogine discovered far-from-equilibrium (away from traditional equilibrium) states best represent the conditions of robust health and well-being.
4. The common view of equilibrium as a desired balance in life was refuted by postmodern science in the 20th century. A full appreciation of this only became apparent in the latter half of the century with advances in chaos theory and other complexity sciences. Much of a new understanding of equilibrium dynamics comes from the Nobel laureate, Ilya Prigogine, and his discoveries of how “chaos gives birth to order” (Briggs & Peat, 1989, pp. 134-135). Prigogine discovered that far-from-equilibrium states best represent the conditions of health and well-being. Near- and close-to-equilibrium states are obstacles to self-realization in a complexity science sense. Ultimate equilibrium, depicted in the flat line of a heart monitor, is death.
Self-organization within a far-from-equilibrium context shows that “systems don’t just breakdown, new systems emerge” (p. 136).
Setting this transformation as a next decade priority will recognize the constant of change in healthy systems so that they can actively exchange with their environments, “using what is there for their own renewal” (Wheatley, 1999, p. 78).
Self-determination – Co-determination/self-organization
The logic of self-determination comes from the mechanical worldview that all things/individuals exist independently in space and time. Purging the view of independent entities and the traditional promotion of independence is difficult even with the principle that “social work is a cooperative endeavor between clients and workers (client participation)”. By adopting co-determination as an instrumental value, social work will shift its primary concern from the individual to the interdependence of individuals in society.
5. The strongly held value of self-determination in social work flows from a divided whole view that all things/individuals exist independently in space and time. This supports the literal interpretation of an individual’s rights to make choices and decisions independent of the impact (positive or negative) that this might may have on others. However, the literal interpretation of this value is not supported in social work; there is usually a responsibility caveat that does not allow this right to infringe on the rights of others.
This caveat opens the door for co-determination to become a new strongly supported priority for the next decade that flows out of an undivided whole worldview.
Linear causes – Nonlinear patterns
Social work has had a long and uneasy affiliation with linear cause-and-effect methods. Linear relationships assume proportionality between cause and effect. An alignment with non-linear knowledge would lead to a better understanding of “small change in one variable can have a disproportional, even catastrophic impact on other variables”.
6. Social work’s affiliation with linear cause-and effect methods. This affliation is generally associated with positivism and empiricist science to guide our understanding of human development, social dynamics, and practice interventions. Linear relationships are usually assumed to be proportional between cause and effect. For example, minimal or large study input will result in minimal or large passing grades. Huge efforts by a social worker will result in huge improvements in social functioning, and so forth. Working definitions of social work were not explicitly aligned with this understanding of cause and effect. Though implicitly they were. For example, the NASW’s 1950s working definition of social work stated that “knowledge of man is never final or absolute . . . and [a social worker] is aware and ready to deal with the spontaneous and unpredictable in human behavior” (NASW, 1958, p. 7).
This suggests the need for a next decade priority alignment with postmodern science and for social workers to be guided by nonlinear pattern dynamics where “a small change in one variable can have a disproportional, even a catastrophic [or miraculous] impact on other variables” (Briggs & Peat, 1989, p. 24).
Dichotomous opposites – Complementarity principle
Analytical observers divide problems into constituent parts to understand discrete contributions to the whole problem. Synthetic observers recognize the complexity of constituent interactions to understand the whole to always be greater/different than the sum of its parts/behaviors. Bohr’s complementarity would transform misleading messages that social work has a dual purpose, or statements that imply dichotomous methods are mutually exclusive of the other in application.
7. Although the method of social work was simply defined in the 1950s as “an orderly systematic mode or procedure” (NASW, 1958, p. 8), it was later more elaborately defined as social workers’ conscious use of self in relationship with others to facilitate interactions and change with their social environments. Change in this facilitated process had three dimensions: “within the individual in relation to his social environment, of the social environment in its effect upon the individual, and of both the individual and the social environment in their interaction” (p. 8). Had this component been grounded to the dual-focus perspective, the statement would have focused on facilitating change to the person or the environment and compatible with the divided whole view, which is grounded to a binary, dichotomous, opposites (either/or) view of reality. It would also have reflected a worldview that the three-dimensional nature of the space we occupy is objectively separated from the observer that occupies a place in the same space. Such a view would also have directed social workers to accept the belief that scientific observers can objectively measure, compare, control, and ultimately understand everything according to mathematical laws without observer interference or bias. These views are generally associated with Rene Descartes’s mechanistic “truth” of mind-body separation in which scepticism concerning everything but the objective observers applied. The legacy of this dichotomous opposite perspective is evident in social work from its earliest conflicts between “settlement” work and “social” work (Kendall, 2000).
A closer look at the Method component suggests the developers either explicitly or intuitively understood Bohr’s (1963) principle of complementarity and wrote the component to help social work shift from the dichotomous opposite bias of a binary approach to a perspective that embraces the interactive complementarity of opposites. In essence, Bohr’s principle states, “Every scientific observation is really a participant-observation—an interaction between the observer and the observed that changes the state of the observed in the very act of observing it” (Frattaroli, 2001, p. 146). Fuller brought the intellectual understanding of the complementarity principle to a practical level (Applewhite, 1977). Because we know that what is observed (three-dimensional space) cannot be independent of the observer, the observer represents an additional dimension, making all observed realities minimally four-dimensional and always influenced by the observer. Frattaroli (2001) referred to another aspect of Bohr’s principle that “science has precisely two particular ways of looking—analytical and synthetic—that produce two very different types of [four-dimensional] observation” (p. 152). The analytical observer divides problems into their constituent parts to provide understanding of their discrete contributions to the whole problem. The synthetic observer recognizes complex interactive patterns of constituent parts with the whole always greater than the sum of the behaviors of its parts.
These apparently mutually exclusive views, however, are complementary and coexist. Thus, Bohr’s principle permits a better understanding of the misleading messages embedded in declarations that social work has a dual purpose or dual focus or in statements that describe dichotomous methods, such as micro and macro, to be mutually exclusive and separate from each other in their applications.
References
Bartlett, H. (1970). Common Base of Social Work Practice. New York: NASW.
Bohm, D. (1983). Wholeness and the Implicate Order. London: Ark Paperbacks.
Briggs, J., & Peat, D. (1989). Turbulent Mirror: An Illustrated Guide to Chaos Theory and the Science of Wholeness. New York: Harper and Row.
Capra, F. (1996). The Web of Life: A New Scientific Understanding of Living Systems. New York: Anchor Books.
Cox, D. (1998). Toward People-Centered Development: The Social Development Agenda and Social Work Education, Indian Journal of Social Work, 59(1), 513-530.
Fratarolli, E. (2001). Healing the Soul in the Age of the Brain: Becoming conscious in and unconscious world. New York: Viking Penquin.
Fuller, R. B. in collaboration with E.J. Applewhite (1975). Synergetics: Explorations in the Geometry of Thinking. New York: Collier Books, Mac Millan Publishing Company.
Hartman, A., & Laird, J. (1983). Family-centered Social Work Practice. New York: Free Press.
IFSW (2000). International Federation of Social Workers Definition of Social Work. Berne: International Federation of Social Workers.
Kendall, K. (1998). Social Work Education: Its origins in Europe. Alexandria, VA: Council of Social Work Education.
NASW, (1958). “Working Definition of Social Work Practice” in Toward clarification and improvement of social work practice. Social Work 3(2), 5-9.
NASW, (1977). Special Issue on Conceptual Frameworks. Social Work 22(5).
NASW (1981). Conceptual frameworks II: Second special issue on conceptual frameworks. Social Work (26) 1.
Rogers, C. (1951). Client-centered Therapy. Boston: Houghton Mifflin.
Forgot to mention,
CASW member of 6-country international definition of social work committee, approved at the Brighton conference, 1982
Past Ex Committee and Treasurer, IFSW, 1984-1992
Member of Global Standards for Social Work committee, approved at the Adelaide conference, 2004
Je suis Clarisse PHOLA TEDIKA de la République Démocratique du Congo, je suis travailleuse sociale au sein du Ministère ayant les Affaires Sociales nous sommes un pays où il ya trop des conflits ; le travail social se fait mais pas d’impacts visibles du fait la corporation est nouvellement installée ni les travailleurs sociaux eux mêmes ni le gouvernement personne ne comprend ce que nous représentons . Voilà pourquoi je m’empresse de participer à cet événement mondial qui aura un impact mondial qui nous permettra de présenter à notre gouvernement un programme décanat pour un nouveau modus operandi