Time for a Change - The Social Work Image Campaign
Social Work Today
By Kate Jackson
Vol. 4 No. 3 p. 12

If the American public gains its perception of social workers from the media, it no doubt sees them in limited and stereotypical ways that are neither accurate nor flattering.

They are, for example, the butt of Woody Allen’s jokes in his film Sleeper; the nerdy, rigid, and uptight casework team in the film A Thousand Clowns; or the well-meaning, yet eccentric, meddling, motherly social worker played by Tyne Daly in television’s “Judging Amy.” It’s an image, some social workers say, that’s ripe for a makeover—which is just what the Massachusetts Campaign for America’s Professional Social Workers has in mind.

The Public Perception — A Distorted Image
“People often think of social workers as do-gooders, not as people who really have the wisdom, skills, and qualifications to work in multiple systems—with organizations, families, children, adults, and couples in a range of venues,” says Carol Bonner, MSW, MBA, LICSW, president of the Massachusetts Campaign for America’s Professional Social Workers and associate dean at Simmons College School of Social Work. “There are people who have worked with social workers who understand and appreciate what social workers do, but professional social work doesn’t have a voice.

We see nurses and physicians on television and in ads and other places, but we don’t often see professional social workers doing the kind of work that we do,” notes Bonner.

“In the popular media, whenever the word social worker is used, it is usually in conjunction with a horrific child welfare story, where somehow the social worker has failed,” suggests Michael P. Melendez, LICSW, BCD, associate professor at Simmons College School of Social Work and president of the National Association of Social Workers (NASW) Massachusetts chapter. Although it isn’t always the case, he adds, when people first see the word social worker, it’s usually in such a context. “It starts to create an attitude,” says Melendez. “Many people think social workers just hand out welfare checks or take kids away from their parents,” observes Carol Brill, PhD, ACSW, LICSW, executive director of the NASW’s Massachusetts chapter. Many social workers operate in an important area of service: unifying families and keeping children safe—an area, notes Bonner, that’s like a lightening rod. “But that’s not all that we do, although it tends to be what gets in the press,” she adds.

“The issue of the social worker’s image is somewhat mixed and confused,” suggests Melendez. “In places that are somewhat sophisticated, there is an appreciation of the range of skills and issues that social workers attend to. But in other circles, when you say social worker, people think of child protective services and child snatchers.” Or, he says, “they have an image of do-gooders, liberals, progressives, and not particularly sophisticated.” Brill agrees: “Depending upon what people read and what kind of contacts they have, they see little pieces of what people who call themselves social workers do.

They’re not necessarily even professional social workers, and that’s the other issue: the name social work has been used very broadly and not applied only to people who are professional social workers who have degrees in social work.” Much of the public, she says, doesn’t really understand that. A similar image problem, explains Bonner, “involves a perception that social workers don’t require any special skills because anyone can be called a social worker.” Social workers, she insists, need to educate people about their roles and how effectively they carry out those roles.

Self-Defeating Behavior
It’s not only the media that contribute to misunderstandings about who social workers are, what they do, and what their value is. Social workers themselves have confounded the issue and through their own behaviors have fostered an identity crisis.

First, explains Bonner, “we tend to be a profession that’s modest and we often don’t feel right about getting the word out there through marketing, so we have done ourselves a disservice through the years.”

There’s been a failure of social workers, she suggests, to promote themselves and/or have as public a voice as they should. Another way in which social workers encourage confusion about their roles is by failing to properly identify themselves or the nature of their services. “There are people with social work degrees—professional social workers who work in a variety of settings—who don’t call themselves professional social workers,” says Bonner. “They take on another name, be it therapist or whatever, and it’s almost as if we’re devaluing ourselves.” That willingness to take on other labels, she believes, feeds some of the misperceptions.

This is particularly true, she suggests, when negative images of social workers are depicted by the media. In such cases, “we aren’t assertively getting out there and saying that that’s not who we are and explaining who we actually are and what our roles are,” says Bonner.

“There’s something within our profession that often disinclines people to identify themselves as social workers,” agrees Melendez. Instead, he says, they may identify themselves as something else, such as psychotherapists if they’re clinical social workers, or as community organizers if they’re in a macrolevel social practice.

Melendez recalls reading a story in Newsweek called “Fixing the In Between,” an article about family therapy: “Almost every major family therapist cited in that article was a social worker, and never once did they refer to themselves as such.” He’s observed that when he meets people in various settings, someone will often introduce himself or herself as a psychotherapist.

When Melendez introduces himself, in turn, as a clinical social worker, the person will then say, “Well, I’m actually a social worker.” Says Melendez, “Sometimes I snap, ‘Then why didn’t you say so?’”

Psychotherapy, he explains, is an activity that’s provided by individuals from various disciplines, but it’s not itself a discipline. “There’s been a historic wish to establish prestige and professionalism, but we have this ambivalence about who we are as a profession,” he says. “It gets played out in many different ways, but it contributes to a misrepresentation of what it is that social workers do, how talented they are, and how they occupy a range of positions. He observes that some presidents of several local neighborhood healthcare centers—quite large comprehensive centers—are social workers, but they never identify themselves as MSWs. “When I sit on boards and someone puts an MD or PhD after his or her name, I insist that my MSW goes there, too,” says Melendez.

Lack of Professional Self-Esteem Part of the willingness to go by names other than social worker is connected to an issue of low professional self-esteem. “We sell out or neglect what has been unique to social work in this quest for the professional identity, which is usually connected to psychotherapy and psychiatry,” says Melendez. Medical social work, he notes, is being taken over by nursing and psychologists. Similarly, nurses are now doing discharge planning and the psychologists, he says, are treating the psychosocial issues of patients. “In some ways, we’ve done ourselves a disservice because we act as if medical social work isn’t as sexy as psychotherapy or being a psychotherapist.” Social workers, he recalls, are the professionals who helped develop the art of home visiting and taking treatment to the individual. The profession, Melendez suggests, devalues some of the wonderful things about what makes it a discipline that is distinct from other disciplines. “We act as if our stuff isn’t good enough in that way,” he remarks.

Forging a New Image
To right these perceptual wrongs, the Massachusetts Campaign for American Professional Social Workers was created. “Our mission is really to put resources—education and information—out into the community about social workers’ roles in issues that affect people in their daily lives.” Secondary to that, Bonner says, “is the hope that people will begin to see social workers associated with many different issues that they’re not often associated with now.”

The campaign originated in 2001. Bonner, a former president of the NASW’s Massachusetts chapter, like several previous presidents had raised the issue of addressing image as a challenge for the organization. The chapter had tackled the problem in various ways at different times, but there had never been a real concerted strategic effort to highlight the image of social workers, says Bonner. When she left the presidency in June 1999, she took the project on and assembled a committee to look at the issue. Bonner created the campaign as a 501c3 organization to raise taxdeductible funds and be eligible for nonprofit rates for media projects. In the first year of the campaign, the NASW Massachusetts chapter contributed approximately $16,000, which enabled the image committee to hire a professional marketing and advertising firm to develop the brand name and a logo. In the early part of the campaign, the chapter also started to provide staff support and named the image campaign as one of the major chapter initiatives in 1999.

Since gaining nonprofit status in December 2002, the organization has focused on fund-raising so it can meet its strategic goals. The campaign’s current goals, explains Bonner, are to reach out to professional social workers through a Web site and create a more public presence for the campaign through advertising and radio and television campaigns. “What the campaign is trying to do is give social work a voice out in the public so people would see us on billboards or hear about professional social workers in radio spots that talk about the issues we deal with and see us in a light that reveals us as well-educated creative problem solvers who have a range of skills to offer to a host of organizations and people,” explains Bonner.

The development of a logo and brand name—America’s Professional Social Workers—was important to create a unifying label, says Bonner. “Because whether we’re clinicians, advocates, or therapists, we’ve all gone to school and received a BSW, an MSW, or a PhD in social work—in some cases, all of the above—and it’s important for the public to know that.” She points out that in some states, such as Massachusetts, people without specific training or education can be called social workers. A person who does charitable work, for example, or a case manager in a hospital or other organization can be called a social worker. “What we want to do in this campaign is distinguish professional social workers as those people who have a degree, internship requirements, and other specialized training. We want to unite the profession around what is common to us, not split it around the ways that we are different.”

Brill believes that since the beginning of the development of the profession, there’s been a lack of information about the field and a lack of clarity about the social worker’s role. “There are many stereotypes and much misinformation, so having a campaign is really a way of social work being assertive in saying, ‘This is who we are, this is what we do for you, your community, and the country, and we want you to know this.’”

Getting Involved
To help improve the image of the professional social worker and support the campaign, social workers can download any of the campaign’s materials from either of the two Web sites that have been created: www.socialworkimage.org and a public Web site, www.makinglifeworkbetter. org. The campaign invites social workers to interact with the public site—for instance, by posting questions and answers around particular issues of their own experience. Bonner says that social workers can pose the question as a consumer and then answer it in a way that would help direct people to answers around particular issues.

Another way in which social workers can participate in the campaign—in addition to monetary donations—is to display its logo and publicity materials in their offices and waiting rooms. “We have a poster, for example,” explains Bonner, “that has four pictures of different social work activities and identifies them as social work.” At the bottom is the campaign logo. “By using these materials, they can underscore in the public eye the role of professional social workers as individuals with degrees who help a variety of clients in a wide range of venues,” she says.

What All Social Workers Can Do Beyond participation in the campaign, there are steps that all social workers can take to sharpen the image of social workers, correct misperceptions, and raise awareness of the profession’s effectiveness. “Social workers can be more proactive in taking on leadership roles in our communities and organizations and when we have some visibility to make known who we are, what we are, and what we do,” advises Bonner. Especially important, she adds, is getting social workers around more of the tables where there are multiple disciplines—for example, on boards, on foundations, and in corporations. “The profession should make an effort to publicize well-known people who may not be widely known to be social workers, such as politicians. There are, for example, two senators and a number of congressional members who are also professional social workers,” she adds.

In addition, says Bonner, social workers can contribute articles to local newspapers about what they’re doing in the community or their private practices. They can write letters to the editor about social issues with which social workers are involved and provide workshops or deliver speeches to local organizations to illustrate what social workers contribute to society and the depth of their knowledge and skills. “One of the main problems is that the public doesn’t understand that professional social work is a knowledgebased profession,” says Brill. “It is important to convey our breadth of knowledge to the public. For example, every time a social worker delivers a substantive speech to the community, such as ‘How to Deal with Your Adolescent,’ or speaks about how to handle elders when they start having problems, the public can see social workers as professionals who have a body of knowledge and can be helpful in their daily lives.” In addition, Brill says, social workers should use National Professional Social Work Month (March) to display photos in their agencies and town centers such as libraries or city halls, illustrating the roles of the social worker.

“Above all,” says Melendez, “as a social worker, you’re an ambassador of the profession, so you must be competent and continue to develop your skill set. Also, as an ambassador, you need to identify that you are a social worker and proud to be a social worker, and you need to identify with the many different people in various fields who bring their social work skills to the positions they hold.” Social workers, he adds, “belong everywhere—from the corporate boardroom down to the street— and I think it’s important that individual social workers be able to say, ‘I’m a social worker,’ ‘I’m a clinical social worker that provides psychotherapy,’ ‘I’m a social worker who’s trained in doing community organizing,’ or ‘I’m an executive director who has a social work background and training.’ I think that’s the foremost thing that individual social workers can do,” advises Melendez.

— Kate Jackson is a staff writer for Social Work Today.