[originally posted on Medium Nov 19, 2022]
The Helping Questions: Notes from the Future
As you may or may not know I have been suffering from severe symptoms stemming from several illnesses including cfs/me, POTS, gastroparesis and more. It’s devastating. As I sit in bed (bedridden) I often journal and dream about my life and a future that I hope for. As I was scrolling through LinkedIn one day I saw Nissens questions for the future of social work.
The beginning of the end of social work as we know it could take so many forms. Personally, I’ve constantly pondered the power of social workers to practice mass refusal. Strikes, new ethical commitments, effforts to abandon much of what we were taught in our programs. Refusal to adhere to the practices of devastation that are often inherent to the systems that many of us work within. I think about how we could transform our yearning to help people. I think about restructuring how we approach help in the first place. Changing this would dramatically alter the systems we encounter and the people we partner with.
Here are some images from my journaling about that, from the perspective of a person in the future. Enjoy and pardon the illustrations, I’m practicing drawing!
