The Association for Community Organization and Social Work Action (ACOSA) was established in the 1980s with a focus on advancing macro practice inside social work schools and the profession. The group has revitalized its focus with emphasis on community practice and social action. Areas of interest include diversity, inclusivity, accountability, and leadership; social and economic equity; eco-justice; workers’ rights; and engaged community partnerships.
Doin’ The Work provides education, training, and support to individuals, groups, and organizations working for racial, social, economic, and political justice. Their approach is anti-racist, anti-oppressive, and liberation-focused.
Click here for Doin’ The Work webpage.
Link to the podcast: Doin’ The Work: Frontline Stories of Social Change.
Pay for Placements is a student-initiated and run campaign that began at the University of Michigan and has currently expanded to 60 chapters across the nation. While distinctions exist at each campus, the chapters are united in their conviction that all student interns, given their large student debt and often serving as replacement labor for unfilled staffing positions, deserve some form of reimbursement for their agency work. A former member of P4P is a member of the SWAC Steering Committee. While P4P is not officially a part of SWAC, we support the fight to end unpaid social work placements.
The Social Service Workers United of Southereast Michigan is an Industrial Organizing Committee of the Ypsilanti branch of the Industrial Workers of the World (I.W.W., a multi-industrial organization “known for its high standards of democracy, transparency, multinationalism, and active use of the right to strike”) comprised of mental health professionals, substance abuse counselors, social workers, child welfare workers, students, and more from across the Washtenaw metro area aiming to organize our colleagues.
Founded 40 years ago as a radical alternative to mainstream social work practice and social work pedagogy, the Social Welfare Action Alliance has a long history of advocating for new forms of critical practice that recognize the power dynamics at play within the social welfare state and its institutions and seek to dismantle them. Their recent efforts have been focused on ensuring that this radical critique and ensuing praxis have been contoured to respond to the explosive forces unleashed since the 2016 election and given full expression on January 6th.
The Social Worker Equity Campaign began in 2021 in response to striking inequities in salary and status for social workers, which stand in sharp contrast to the field’s stated social justice commitments to clients. Campaign efforts focus on internal reforms within NASW and CSWE that shift the professional culture toward one that emphasizes collective action and mutual self-interest between clients and professionals, similar to those found in nurses’ and teachers’ unions and associations.
The upEND Movement is a collaborative movement that works to abolish the existing child welfare system, which is built on a model of surveillance and separation and is more accurately described as a family policing system. Abolition requires ending this oppressive system and imagining and recreating how society supports children, families, and communities in being safe and thriving.
The Abolitionist Social Change Collective (ASCC) focuses on research and data collection from thousands of respondents nationwide on inequities and biases in the social work licensing exam and ongoing CEU requirements.
To connect, email abolitionist-sw-sig+subscribe@googlegroups.com.
If you run into access issues, please feel free to email Sophia Sarantakos at Sophia.Sarantakos@du.edu.