CRISP: Getting Social Workers Out of the Closet (Highly Recommended for Macro Folks!)

Charles E. Lewis, Jr. released an editorial on why social workers need to look beyond licensure and title issues and embrace all aspects (micro, mezzo, and macro) of social work in the public domain. We need to reach out to professionals with social work degrees but never refer to themselves as social workers because their positions/fields are not clinical. A person with an accredited social work degree (B.S.W., M.S.W., or Ph.D. in Social Work) should be able to call themselves a social worker.

There has been much talk recently about who can legitimately call themselves social workers. What training is required? Which licenses are needed? And, there have been many discussions about the variations of social work licenses that exist in different states. License or no license, we know that many social workers are “hiding” in non-clinical environments and in places where it doesn’t seem much social work is happening. Places like Congress, the World Bank and federal agencies such as the departments of Labor, Housing, Education and Health and Human Services (HHS). In many of these settings, social workers operate under cover. They often do not identify themselves as social workers and they have little or no connection to professional social work organizations. Yet they are trained social workers with a B.S.W, a M.S.W., or a Ph.D. from an accredited social work school, but you would never know.