Wow. What was 2020? There was a lot that happened, a lot of it bad. But there were some moments of clarity that helped show what is also possible in this world. We'll go in a little about that, why student loans should be cancelled, what the point of social work is at this moment in our lives, and this year's Goodreads challenges (spoiler: 2020's challenge didn't go as planned!)  Transcript can be found here: http://decolonizesocialwork.org/episode/return-sorts ..read more

CW: Please be advised that in the following episode we discuss police violence against Black communities, including murder, and trauma experienced by survivors of human trafficking. ~ We need to talk about social workers and the police. Again ..read more

With the global and local effects of COVID-19 bearing down on us and without any clear expectation of when it might end, it's as important as ever to take care of our communities. In this episode, we talk about the importance of mutual aid, the history of these networks, and why - if you haven't before - now is the time to seriously consider getting involved with them ..read more

Working under stressful, unhealthy conditions is an ailment in the field of social work that mutes the voices of social workers, leads to burn out, and ultimately results in poor services to our clients. Worker-owned cooperatives offer an alternative to the hyper-capitalistic model we're all familiar with by giving power back to us - the workers - as collective owners of our work. It also enables us to center our values instead of our profit-margins. Listen and learn about the benefits of worker-owned cooperatives, and then get out there and take back social work! And for real, let's agree to ..read more

Note: This episode was recorded in October 2019, so while the conversation here is pure and timeless, please excuse a couple of out-of-time mentions about the Kentucky governor's race - cuz that already happened! Social workers spend a lot of time researching, talking about, and working together to come up with ways we can better serve our clients and communities. But what if the way we improve our services and support was by helping ourselves on the labor side of social work? Social workers routinely talk about how overworked and underpaid they are - but why does it have to be this way? Th ..read more

PART 1 OF 2! Threatening to separate families that don’t conform to colonizer norms is as old as the United States itself. This threat and the actual removal of children from their families has been institutionalized in what is now known as the modern child welfare system. Most social workers are familiar with some iteration of the child welfare system. In fact, popular opinion would probably have you (misguidedly) believe that social work IS child welfare. But really, what is this system that we call child welfare? Can the welfare of any and every child truly be determined by an entity ..read more

In any program that trains and prepares social works, you will no doubt encounter issues about objectivity, exploitation, and dual relationships. Usually, though, those concepts are taught to us in strictly binary terms. In this episode, Ondine and Drew look at an example of community-based social work in Cuba to deconstruct how we in the United States might do better to reconsider our attachment to objectivity as well as our total avoidance of dual relationships. ALSO ALSO ALSO: We've uploaded a transcript for this episode! Check out this link, or go to decolonizesocialwork.org and click on ..read more

Pilot: Is social work actually the social justice profession it claims to be? What are we getting right? In what ways might we be doing more harm than good? Social work is an amazing field, but it also exists in a society driven by white supremacy culture and colonizer ideology. In this podcast, Ondine and Drew begin an ongoing conversation to explore social work and look at when it rejects those harmful social constructs, where it might need to still do better, and if social work can truly liberate us from oppression ..read more

We - as in social workers - need to talk about police violence against Black people ..read more

Several episodes into this project, and we take a leap back to offer some further groundwork for what we mean when we say "decolonization" in social work but also in society. We hope to clarify that, to paraphrase Eve Tuck and K. Wayne Yang, that decolonization is not a metaphor for a different or better version of the same old social work. Prepare to get out of our comfort zones, everybody ..read more