elcome to Social Work Gatherings, an electronic organizing web site for social work practitioners and educators who have completed the People's Institutes Undoing Racism Workshop™. Initially serving the New York City metro area, Social Work Gatherings proudly expands outward across the United States.

The Undoing Racism Workshop™ moved us beyond a focus on the symptoms of racism to an understanding of what it is, where it comes from, how it functions, why it persists and how it can be undone. We now have a common language and understanding of race and racism that enables us to organize and build useful coalitions that will work towards institutional equity without minority status and social change.

Social Work Gatherings is a space where we can come together, share our thoughts and begin to develop a continuing community to bring about a new vision of what social justice will look like in our times. Our focus is to bring about systemic and structural change while providing much needed individual assistance.

This web site allows us to organize our growing membership body by location and field of practice for the purpose of building strong regional alliances that will support one another as we expand our movement. You can go to ARA Training to find out about the next workshop, or order tickets online here.

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April 2012

As social workers, we call on NASW to nationally mobilize our profession in response to the killing of Trayvon Martin and so many others before and after him. We must move to stop the dehumanization we observe in both the killings and in the events occurring around the investigations of these deaths. We understand that this is not an isolated incident, but a manifestation of the structural racism embedded in the systems and institutions we encounter in our work. We witness structural racism in: child welfare, criminal justice, child and family work, education, etc. The arrest and prosecution of one murderer will do nothing to address the broad application of violence as one arm of this oppression.

Institutional racism is one of our nation's greatest barriers to reaching its potential. It causes ongoing trauma in communities of color and is damaging to the white community. In our work/agency setting, we observe the ongoing impact of historical trauma experienced by people of color since their enslavement. Trauma prevents people from actualizing themselves and from fulfilling their potential--both for those who experience it and those who witness it. Racism engenders fear of moving outside of segregated communities; of having meaningful cross-racial dialogues; of authentic interracial relationships; and it challenges the mental health of our nation.

The social work community cannot continue to offer symptom management to people suffering from the effects of trauma without speaking to the structures that continue to inflict trauma on individuals, families, and communities. We have a responsibility to find our collective humanity. We are accountable to actions that dismantle manifestations of structural racism. We must challenge laws like Florida's "Stand Your Ground" and practices such as "stop-and-frisk." The racially based disproportionate application of these types of procedures legalizes, maintains, and upholds structural racism.

We call on NASW to take action. We will not become hopeless, numb, silent, and immobilized. We must use our skills and our profession to stand in solidarity with the communities we serve in order to create a future of equity, justice, and hope, as our professional values and ethics demand.

Resources:
AntiRacistAlliance.com
SocialWorkGatherings.com
www.pisab.org
http://sites.google.com/site/radicalswg/about-us

We call upon National Association of Social Workers and chapters to mobilize its base and build a movement for anti-racist social change. This will happen when we address, as a collective, how structural racism is built into us, our own institutions, and in every system.

February 2007 - A Call to Schools of Social Work: Prepare the Profession to Undo Structural Racism

Contact Us

Click on the link below to go to
The Anti-Racist Alliance,
the Web-Based Curriculum on Whiteness.