Co-generating happy, healthy social work: How do you want to be working in the future?

We are all privileged listeners to people when we join them for part of their life journeys. Sometimes this is a voluntary relationship, sometimes it happens through a community decision taken by one of the ‘systems or policies’ to accompany someone through a moment of their lives when times are tough. What we do together with that time and space can have a lifelong impact on that person’s well-being and on ourselves, given we are the tools of our trade. We work in a complex environment where interactions, relationships, social justice and ethical practice are knitted together as illustrated by one of our colleagues.

Other colleagues suggested less paperwork, more time with people, less tokenism, all the usual issues you might find when a group of people who work in social work get together. But let’s delve deeper into what they know would work better:

- Time to listen and work with people co-building assessments.

- Using community language, not jargon.

- Local available accessible grassroots resources where preventive support is immediately available.

- Stop using private companies, who pay minimum wages that generate huge profits, redistributing that investment to where it has direct impact on well-being.

- More self-care options.

- Accountability in our leaders.

- Developing leaderful communities .

But how we can co-design and co-build change? Across the world local circles of practice and wider communities of interest are being developed across the world to bring people together to develop happy, healthy social work environments. They have moved on from the classic professional associations and colleges of the past 200 years, responding to how people live their lives now. These offer opportunities for us to make our role in contributing to co-building sustainable change for our shared futures, a more rewarding and therefore happier future.

They start with people getting together locally and building up communities, perhaps over a cup of coffee, and sharing what works, as well as what needs to change. COVID challenged us, the pressure of work challenges us, hot desking challenges us, online meetings challenge us. The very core of working with people through co-building relationships has ceased to be central to our work. Social administration has engulfed social work.

Local circles of practice co-generate energy, together we have more umph than if we try and do things alone. But we also have huge resources available online, practice wisdom, research, books about theory and practice, listening to what works in other parts of the world. We live in an exciting regenerating, innovative planet that we can learn so much from as we look, listen and feel the changes around us. We can access this through the internet and AI. We need to learn how to achieve balance between what technology allows us to access and our inherent need for social interaction and well-being. We need to reinstate the importance of human relationships in our work.

Why now? In 2022, the People’s Charter for an Eco Social World, was developed by millions of people through a leaderful global community including UNRISD and IFSW. This did not find traction in the UK, as we have somehow lost the leaderful communities that helped shape the welfare system in the C20th. Many of our associations and professional bodies have ceased to be membership led and give little help in enabling us to share policy and practice issues, preferring web-based meetings. Rather than enabling debates about the way we can influence grassroots change, helping us work together to promote social justice and human rights, working in and with our communities for people to enjoy healthy happy lives we are bombarded with social media messages on a one-way path.

We started a conversation in Birmingham at the Social Work Show. If we are positively engaged in our work, working alongside people who are making key decisions at critical times in their lives, well supported by employers in this complex work, we can have very happy and healthy social workers. Together we can do this!