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From June 2001 NASW NEWS Social Work a Choice Profession
I have had a wonderful time over the last two years serving as president. I don't think the reality of my term being over has hit me yet. You have given me the opportunity to visit many chapters and meet with you in all kinds of work settings. You have told me about your dreams for our profession and your concerns about how we are facing the future. In my formal presentations at chapter conferences, I've tried to bring a message of hope and encouragement, of reality and challenge, and of readiness to take on those challenges. Thank you for being so hospitable and so reaffirming. I have not been able to answer every letter, but I have read each one and taken their contents into account as the issues they addressed were being discussed. I have been fortunate to have had the counsel of board members and staff who wear their commitment to NASW and to our profession proudly and who have helped me to provide leadership during my term. There are many people I want to thank for helping me along the way, but I want to say a very special and public "thank you" to Doreta Richards, senior associate for governance, for her dedication, her diligence and competence and her wonderful and comforting way of helping presidents do their job. Thank you, Doreta. I'd like to share excerpts from some of my formal presentations to members over the last two years: "I'm the kind of person who often says yes to something without having a clue as to what it's going to mean and then finds herself saying, 'Now what do I do?' Well, believe me that over the last two years, I have heard more about what I should be doing than I have cared to. . . . In my role as president of NASW, I have tried to pay attention to what everyone has said, but as you can imagine, everyone has a different and usually opposite position. So, ultimately, it does come down to trying to do the best I can, just as each of you tries to do the best you can. "I've done a lot of thinking over the last 15 years or so about who I am, why I chose social work and how I want to be as a human being who cares about people, including my family and friends. . . . As each of us grows older, hopefully we become a little clearer about what is truly important. Hopefully, we are better able to shed some of our earlier drives for material things and look more to what makes us feel complete as a human being, as a parent, as an adult child of aging parents, as a brother or a sister, as a friend, and as a neighbor. "Sometimes we look back at old relationships and wonder what happened. How is it that we have lost touch with some of the people who once were so very important to us? We usually promise that we will renew those old relationships, stay in touch and try to spend a little time with people from our past. Sometimes we do. Too often, we don't. "Some of us are probably old enough to remember the days when neighbors looked out for each other, when you knew your mailman's name, when you could talk to the children on your block as though they were your children. . . . We all know that there is a drastic difference today in the way we treat each other and in what we expect from one another. Do you find yourself asking, 'Why doesn't somebody do something?' or, 'Who's responsible for this?' or 'Why doesn't so-and-so do something?' "Do you ignore that little nagging voice in your head that says, 'If I won't do something, who will?' Do you answer that nagging voice by saying, 'I don't know what to do,' or, 'Things are so out of hand,' or, 'I just don't have the energy anymore'? . . . "Sometimes, as social workers, we make our already difficult job even more difficult by jealousy guarding our turf while coveting the turf of others. We've created a language of acronyms intelligible only to ourselves — ILP, ISP, CPS, CLA, and so on. "The public is rarely interested in what we do as social workers or in whom we serve until things go wrong — seeking to blame rather than to help, being unrealistic in their expectations and finally, much too often, not being willing to pay the price of undoing the harm that has been done through societal neglect and not being willing to invest in programs that can prevent new and further harm from being done. And too many of our legislators take their lead from the voting public, allegedly saving the 'taxpayer' while condemning those in need. . . . "These realities make for very demanding challenges for us as ordinary human beings, as well as for us as individuals who have chosen social work as our profession. "We've seen astounding progress in the development of our profession over the last 100 years. In some ways, we seem to have come full circle. We have returned to respecting the role of communities and the importance of community development in addressing social problems. We allow ourselves to talk again about social class across racial and ethnic lines, to see how disparities in economic and educational opportunities create tensions that reach explosive levels. "So, where do we go from here? I once heard Toni Morrison give an address entitled 'Future Tense.' What a wonderful play on words. We know that the future will be tense. We also know that with tension comes opportunity. We have the opportunity to go back to the future, to rely on each other for support and growth, to work with children and families one on one, to go back to our grass-roots communities or modern settlement houses thinking and talking community development. "We have the opportunity to support our local divisions and chapters of NASW and to take that strength to the national organization. We need to use the social policy statements in Social Work Speaks as the basis for our social work practice and make this the time when our program priorities and our statements of social policy reflect our renewed commitment to social change and social justice and to ourselves as professional social workers. We need to ensure that our practice wisdom influences our social service agencies and our schools of social work. We must thank ourselves for a job well done — certainly not finished, but well done nonetheless. And we must continue to support and to embrace each other as we face each day's challenges." I am grateful that more than 30 years ago, social work chose me. Now I can honestly say that I have chosen it. And as I end my term as national president of NASW, I am grateful to all of you for your commitment to our profession. Let us work together to tell the world how special and wise we are to have chosen social work as our profession. Back to NASW NEWS Contents
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By Ruth W. Mayden, MSS, LSW