NASW Iowa Chapter 2025 Symposium
Hope, Healing, and Advocacy:
Managing the Personal and the Professional

Join us for a Facebook Live with NASW President Dr. Yvonne Chase and a panel of climate change experts to discuss how global warming is affecting our nation, what social workers should know about this issue, and how they can respond. 

This training will define and explore cultural relevance and diversity by uncovering the complexities of cultural identities. Introduce to you the curriculum, Three C’s: Cultural Competence, Cultural Sensitivity, and Cultural Humility. The Three C’s are what I consider the foundation of Cultural Relevance. We will look at the range of factors that influence individuals and who they are, their choices, life events, and decisions that intersect with their interactions with social constructs.

Social workers are a unique and vital part of legal defense teams within the criminal justice system. Public defense social work is a small but growing field, with opportunities to work on multidisciplinary teams in a unique context, supporting and advocating for individuals who have been marginalized and dehumanized by both society and the legal system. This training aims to explore the landscape of the criminal legal system in Washington, the role of a social worker within a multidisciplinary defense team, and how this work supports broader goals of macro-level advocacy and social change. It will also address implicit bias that social workers internalize about the social construction of crime and "criminals," and discuss how defense social workers can address this same bias within members of the criminal legal system through mitigation, a method of contextualizing an individual's criminal legal involvement through a person-centered and trauma-informed lens.