From the Director
Being Thankful for Our Profession
By Elizabeth J. Clark, Ph.D., ACSW, MPH
 November is a short month. Its claim to fame is its fourth
Thursday, when we celebrate Thanksgiving. For many years Thanksgiving, also
known as”turkey day,” has been mainly a secular holiday that includes a big
meal, Black Friday, football games and parades. Almost 80 percent of business
and government workers are given both Thursday and Friday as paid holidays. It
has become a long weekend to spend with family and friends.
As with other customs, there are historical explanations for
the holiday. In grade school we learned that Thanksgiving began with a meal
between Pilgrims and the Wampanoag Indians in 1621. The day was later
proclaimed a national holiday by President Abraham Lincoln during the Civil War
in 1863, and it has been celebrated annually since then. It was originally a
day marked by giving thanks for a bountiful harvest, for peace or for those in
the military fighting to keep us safe. For a few years, President Franklin
Roosevelt made the holiday a week earlier with the hope that a longer time
between Thanksgiving and Christmas would assist merchants with increased sales
and might help end the Great Depression.
There are similarities between the holiday today and
Thanksgivings of the past. This year, we are grateful that most of our troops
have left Iraq. We are relieved that oil is no longer spilling into the Gulf of
Mexico. We are happy to see some positive bounce in the stock market and lower
prices for gas. But we know that many people in our country are struggling —
that houses are being foreclosed, the unemployment rate remains near double
digits, people are still uninsured and food pantries can’t keep up.
Social workers provide society’s safety net. We touch 10
million lives each day, and we use all the resources available to us to try to
help people improve their standard of living and their quality of life. We
advocate for fair policies and adequate funding of social services. We work for
peace and social justice and work with those who are marginalized and
forgotten.
We have never been more needed.
Sometimes, though, we feel like the profession, and by
extension those of us who are part of it, have also been marginalized and
forgotten. As state governments and employers work to balance their own budgets
or their bottom lines, social work jobs are frequently seen as “value added,”
not essential. The cuts are deep, the caseloads are high.
We find hope in remembering that the social workers who came
before us brought about great change even in the face of great adversity.
Social workers like Frances Perkins and Harry Hopkins helped to end the Great
Depression and World War II. Whitney Young and Dorothy Height changed the way
the country viewed civil rights. Delwin Anderson was instrumental in changing
the way we care for our veterans, and Dame Cicely Saunders forever changed how
we help those with terminal illnesses. Other social work pioneers have had a
positive and long-lasting impact on areas such as mental health, child abuse,
foster care, long-term care and chronic diseases.
We are grateful for the paths these historical social workers
forged and the legacies they left. Most importantly, we continue to be inspired
by them — to try harder, reach higher, keep moving forward, continue working
for change.
As a profession we are tenacious and resilient. We don’t give
up. We don’t quit. We don’t stop trying to make a difference in people’s lives,
in our communities or in our nation. So this Thanksgiving, on our list of
things to be grateful for, we should include the collective commitment and
undaunted determination of our chosen profession.
From November 2010 NASW News. © 2010 National
Association of Social Workers. All Rights Reserved. NASW News
articles may be copied for personal use, but proper notice of
copyright and credit to the NASW News must appear on all copies
made. This permission does not apply to reproduction for advertising,
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