Social Work's Grand Challenges: Mobilizing the Profession

Abstract

In January 2016, at the Society for Social Work and Research conference, the American Academy of Social Work and Social Welfare released 12 grand challenges for the social work profession. These grand challenges were developed through an iterative process to fortify a call to action for the social work profession to address major social problems plaguing the nation (Barth, Gilmore, Flynn, Fraser, & Brekke, 2014). The grand challenge process has been used in other professions, disciplines, and organizations. It originated in the 1980s, when the U.S. government developed grand challenges in response to major public policy issues that needed in-depth attention and solutions. The grand challenge approach has been used in professions such as engineering (Mitcham, 2014), and in subject areas such as global mental health (Collins, Insel, Chockalingam, Daar, & Maddox, 2013) and HIV (Kaaya et al., 2013). The grand challenge structure has been used to advance a collective movement toward addressing important issues. Grand challenges provide focused attention on collectively identified subject areas, whereby professions or groups can mobilize toward developing lasting policy and practice solutions with regard to these areas (Padilla & Fong, 2016; Williams, 2015). In this case, the grand challenges are in areas that the social work profession has engaged in scholarship and practice and in which there is a demonstrated ability to be impactful through a concentrated effort. This statement means that social work’s grand challenges go beyond any social work organization or school of social work. The grand challenges address common interests across professional groups and are not specific to any one organization or perspective. The grand challenge structure also encourages the development of resources to deal with the identified areas and serves as a mobilizing call across social work organizations, schools, and individuals to come together and address some of the most pressing issues of our time (Kuhlmann & Rip, 2014). It is important that social workers become familiar with the grand challenges and understand that each practitioner has a role to play in advancing solutions and creating lasting change, particularly in the areas in which they practice or have influence.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 14 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.