The Texas Institute for Child & Family Wellbeing has released their third edition of Clinician’s Corner on the digital blogging platform Medium. This annual publication is meant to unite social work research and practice by exploring various issues relevant to the social work discipline.
The 2020 edition, titled “Everyday Justice: Cultivating intentional connection,” explores the various ways in which social workers can practice social justice within themselves, with their clients and within already existing systems. Each section explores social justice from a different lens, and provides guidance for practitioners and researchers.
Self: This section focuses on how the practitioner can begin this work within themselves, which prepares them to promote social justice in a larger context. Sarah Sloan shares how to re-engage with your social justice values when the going gets tough. Adam McCormick explores implicit bias within our profession, while Ana Vidina Hernández, Jillian Severinski, Anayeli Marcos, and Dora Gonzales ask us to reconceptualize our role as helpers, using examples from their work with asylum-seekers at our Texas-Mexico border.
Clients: How do we lean into social justice when working with our clients? We begin this section with an interview with Scott Sells who provides us with practical tools to use within the client-practitioner relationship, and Jolynne Batchelor shares applicable ways we can incorporate social justice into practice while working with families in the child welfare system.
Systems: In this section, we explore ways to increase social justice within already existing systems. We begin with several voices from the Black Mamas Community Collective, where Michele Rountree, Nakeenya Wilson, and Joyce James share how they are working to address maternal health disparities systemically. Jennifer Lawson provides guidance on how to use program evaluation as a conduit for social justice. Tanya Rollins asks us to reconsider how we engage with pre-existing communities, and our Institute Director, Monica Faulkner, closes our 2020 edition with an outline on how to bring shared leadership into an organization.