'Green' Social Work
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Environmental Social Work is emerging as a specialist area of social work practice.
Social worker is concerned with the 'person in environment' (PIE). But is the 'environment' only social? Can this be extended to include the natural world? |
“Social workers have the opportunity to be part of the solution rather than an uninvolved bystander to the emerging environmental predicament”
McKinnon, 2008, p. 266. |
Transferable Skills: Comment by Lynsey Ellis
'Sustainable Social Work: a response to the climate emergency from social work education and practice in Aotearoa, New Zealand'. PhD thesis, Massey University, New Zealand, 2020
Lynsey Ellis warns that "the impacts of climate change will exacerbate current inequities across all systems of development." As a social work educator she affirms that "social workers are experienced in working with symptoms of inequity and social injustice in practice", and aims to "help social workers to understand the strengths and relevance of their current skills to the topic. I believe that any issues that exacerbate inequities in society must be the concern of social workers, for example they have experience working on issues such as poverty, homelessness, child abuse and domestic violence to name a few. Social workers have skills to offer that can transfer to supporting people suffering inequities in response to climate change impacts." (p8)
"The connection between physical climate changes and the consequent health and social effects need to be understood by all social workers" (p14)
'Sustainable Social Work: a response to the climate emergency from social work education and practice in Aotearoa, New Zealand'. PhD thesis, Massey University, New Zealand, 2020
Lynsey Ellis warns that "the impacts of climate change will exacerbate current inequities across all systems of development." As a social work educator she affirms that "social workers are experienced in working with symptoms of inequity and social injustice in practice", and aims to "help social workers to understand the strengths and relevance of their current skills to the topic. I believe that any issues that exacerbate inequities in society must be the concern of social workers, for example they have experience working on issues such as poverty, homelessness, child abuse and domestic violence to name a few. Social workers have skills to offer that can transfer to supporting people suffering inequities in response to climate change impacts." (p8)
"The connection between physical climate changes and the consequent health and social effects need to be understood by all social workers" (p14)
Articles
Reclaiming and Reconstituting our Understanding of “Environment” in Social Work Theory,
James P. Mulvale
Canadian Social Work Review, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2017), pp. 169-186.
Read article via Research Gate
Mulvale outlines historical and current developments in social work theory relating to valuing the natural environment. He compares more practical (what he calls ‘idealist’) approaches with more big-picture (which he calls ‘structuralist’) approaches. He leans towards the big view of root social change.
James P. Mulvale
Canadian Social Work Review, Vol. 34, No. 2 (2017), pp. 169-186.
Read article via Research Gate
Mulvale outlines historical and current developments in social work theory relating to valuing the natural environment. He compares more practical (what he calls ‘idealist’) approaches with more big-picture (which he calls ‘structuralist’) approaches. He leans towards the big view of root social change.
“Learning from our past: climate change and disaster interventions in practice”
Lena Dominelli,
in Carolyn Noble, Helle Strauss & Brian Littlechild,
Global social work: Crossing borders, blurring boundaries (2014, Sydney University Press, 341-352)
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1fxm2q.28
In this chapter, I highlight the roles that social workers have played in disaster interventions, including their capacity to work in multi disciplinary teams to enhance the humanitarian services provided.
The combination of direct action and research reveals that with leadership commitment and energy, social work can innovate and foster practice in new directions and promote the production of shared knowledge and learning. This is an emerging aspect of the profession – green social work.
Goals include:
• developing interdisciplinary approaches to both natural and human made disasters, co-producing solutions with local players,
• enhancing local initiatives and resilience, developing disaster intervention criteria that are locality specific and culturally relevant,
• strengthening the role of the social work profession and disaster interventions and climate change discussions, locally, nationally and internationally.
Social workers have transferable skills and interviewing people mobilising resources, raising consciousness about social problems that affect the wellbeing and livelihoods of people, flora, fauna and the physical environment, and facilitating the development of solutions and actions that bring communities together in institutional expressions of solidarity, individual initiatives promoting goodwill and enhancing understandings of the inter interdependent connectivities that mean that finding solutions to the problems initiated by climate change will benefit every living being on planet earth.
Lena Dominelli,
in Carolyn Noble, Helle Strauss & Brian Littlechild,
Global social work: Crossing borders, blurring boundaries (2014, Sydney University Press, 341-352)
https://doi.org/10.2307/j.ctv1fxm2q.28
In this chapter, I highlight the roles that social workers have played in disaster interventions, including their capacity to work in multi disciplinary teams to enhance the humanitarian services provided.
The combination of direct action and research reveals that with leadership commitment and energy, social work can innovate and foster practice in new directions and promote the production of shared knowledge and learning. This is an emerging aspect of the profession – green social work.
Goals include:
• developing interdisciplinary approaches to both natural and human made disasters, co-producing solutions with local players,
• enhancing local initiatives and resilience, developing disaster intervention criteria that are locality specific and culturally relevant,
• strengthening the role of the social work profession and disaster interventions and climate change discussions, locally, nationally and internationally.
Social workers have transferable skills and interviewing people mobilising resources, raising consciousness about social problems that affect the wellbeing and livelihoods of people, flora, fauna and the physical environment, and facilitating the development of solutions and actions that bring communities together in institutional expressions of solidarity, individual initiatives promoting goodwill and enhancing understandings of the inter interdependent connectivities that mean that finding solutions to the problems initiated by climate change will benefit every living being on planet earth.
Networks
One network is the Green Social Work Network of the AASW (Australia): view website HERE
which seeks as its purpose:
• Greening social work practice
• Raising awareness around our role as Green Social Work practitioners
• Highlight the different dimensions of sustainability: social, environmental, ethical, historical, intergenerational, and economic
• Promote a planetary-consciousness approach
• Promote a holistic understanding of the environment
• Promote sustainable ways of living and practicing as social workers
• Promote eco-integrity ethics
• Advocate the need to embed sustainability and spirituality in the social work curriculum
• Promote adding a spiritual model to bio-psycho-social assessment
• Advocate that human-constructed ethics should not promote the exploitation of animals
• Identify the consequences of slow violence and ways macro, meso and micro social work practice can bring about social change
• Promote the decolonization of social work practice
• Critically analyse the challenges neoliberalism brings forth
which seeks as its purpose:
• Greening social work practice
• Raising awareness around our role as Green Social Work practitioners
• Highlight the different dimensions of sustainability: social, environmental, ethical, historical, intergenerational, and economic
• Promote a planetary-consciousness approach
• Promote a holistic understanding of the environment
• Promote sustainable ways of living and practicing as social workers
• Promote eco-integrity ethics
• Advocate the need to embed sustainability and spirituality in the social work curriculum
• Promote adding a spiritual model to bio-psycho-social assessment
• Advocate that human-constructed ethics should not promote the exploitation of animals
• Identify the consequences of slow violence and ways macro, meso and micro social work practice can bring about social change
• Promote the decolonization of social work practice
• Critically analyse the challenges neoliberalism brings forth
