This piece is an unplanned follow up, written in response to the extraordinary volume of feedback to my previous article. You may wish to read that analysis first for full context.
Editor’s Note (6:20 pm December 11, 2025): This article has been updated to include formal letters from NASW Texas and Michigan chapters, to correct Dr. Gandarilla-Javier’s title, to add context from a September 2024 board statement, and to reflect verification of the December 8 email.
NASW Restructuring Article Response
On Friday, I published an analysis of the November NASW restructuring decision. The response revealed something I did not fully anticipate: the gap between what social workers wanted to say and what they felt they could say publicly. Therein lies the true story.
Within hours, messages arrived from former chapter directors who felt discarded by the organization they had faithfully served for years. Former national staff confirmed what many suspected. Current leaders explained that they could not speak publicly for fear of retaliation. Anonymous Reddit discussions became the only spaces where practitioners could name what they had witnessed.
The response confirmed what the restructuring itself revealed: a profession struggling with the distance between its stated values and its organizational practice.
A Systemic Pattern, Not an Isolated Crisis
The November 2025 restructuring did not emerge from nowhere. It sits inside a longer pattern of conflict, silence, and contested governance.
Last year, NASW Vice President and National Board member Dr. Sharon Gandarilla-Javier publicly announced her resignation. Her original LinkedIn statement was edited multiple times within hours, then reduced to a single sentence. A preserved copy on Reddit describes her account of being pressured to resign after questioning CEO Anthony Estreet’s handling of the Preferra insurance collapse. In that statement, she alleged serious concerns about workplace climate, financial management, and retaliation, and stated that her duty of loyalty lay with the organization’s mission rather than any individual leader.
Context for her resignation appears in an earlier September 2024 board statement defending CEO Anthony Estreet against what they characterized as ‘maliciously published’ and ‘alleged unfounded grievances.’ The board stated they stood ‘firmly behind Dr. Estreet and the leadership team as they address these challenges head on.’ Three months later, the Vice President resigned after questioning the CEO’s handling of the Preferra crisis.
Whether these allegations will ultimately be substantiated is a matter for investigation. What matters here is the pattern: a sitting Vice President described pressure to resign after raising concerns, and her attempt to speak publicly about it was quickly constrained and then largely erased. That context helps explain why so many people now fear speaking out.
The pattern continued. Boards in Arkansas, South Dakota, and Kentucky resigned in full. Iowa’s chapter issued a vote of no confidence citing opaque decision-making and concerns about retaliation. Kansas publicly challenged the removal of its director and the absence of clear process.
Taken together, these events suggest more than a single controversial decision. They point toward systemic governance failure.
The Scope Becomes Clear
Since the November restructuring, at least seven state chapters have taken formal institutional action challenging national leadership’s decisions and governance practices.
Iowa issued a vote of no confidence citing opaque decision-making and concerns about retaliation. Kansas publicly challenged the removal of its director. Board members in Arkansas, South Dakota, and Kentucky resigned in full rather than continue under the current structure.
This week, two additional major chapters formalized their positions. The NASW Texas Executive Board, representing one of NASW’s largest and most active chapters, issued a vote of no confidence in executive leadership. The NASW Michigan Board, representing 5,000 members and over 32,000 licensed social workers in the state, issued a unanimous vote of no confidence and explicitly called for the resignation of both the CEO and Board President if immediate corrective action is not taken.
Both letters make nearly identical demands:
- Financial transparency, including five years of financials and third-party audit
- Full account of restructuring decision-making process
- Establishment of independent steering committee with chapter representation
- Publication of board agendas, minutes, and voting records
- Written acknowledgment and action plan within 14 days
Texas’s letter notes a particularly important ethical dimension: “Texas social workers expect NASW to champion fair labor practices, reasonable workloads, transparency, and member-centered policy decisions. Yet the recent restructuring asks Executive Directors to absorb multi-state responsibilities without adequate compensation, staffing, or structural support.”
Michigan’s letter is even more direct in its assessment: “At this time, the NASW–Michigan Board finds that these standards are not being upheld.”
These are not anonymous complaints. These are formal institutional statements from elected chapter leadership, representing tens of thousands of social workers, using their organizational authority to demand accountability.
Like-minded members can join NASW Texas’ sign-on letter, reflecting many of the concerns listed above.
What the Numbers Reveal
Many assumed NASW’s restructuring reflected financial collapse or mass membership loss following the Preferra insurance crisis. Yet NASW’s own IRS Form 990 filings do not support that narrative. Membership dues revenue over the past four fiscal years (ending June 30) remained stable:
- $18.81 million in FY 2021
- $19.15 million in FY 2022
- $19.37 million in FY 2023
- $19.42 million in FY 2024
While growth plateaued, the data show neither catastrophic membership decline nor fiscal emergency. Unless something catastrophic occurred between June 2024 (the fiscal year end in the 2024 filing) and November 2025, recent decisions do not appear driven by financial necessity.
The broader financial picture further undermines claims of crisis. NASW’s total revenue and expenses over the same period show an organization that operated at or near break-even:
- FY 2021: Net income of $2.22 million
- FY 2022: Net income of $6.23 million
- FY 2023: Net loss of $269,000
- FY 2024: Net income of $39,000
Three of the past four years showed positive net income. This marks a significant improvement over the prior seven fiscal years (2014-2020), which each recorded net losses ranging from $1.48 million to $3.35 million annually.
If the restructuring were in response to imminent collapse, the data would reflect crisis. They do not. Financial performance from 2021 through 2024 shows stabilization, not emergency.
This matters because it clarifies what the restructuring was not:
- It was not forced by sudden collapse in dues
- It was not a last-resort austerity response
- It was not an emergency measure to keep the organization afloat
This reframes the issue entirely. If not compelled by financial necessity, it must be understood as a matter of choice.
Why choose an approach that bypassed chapter leadership, ignored participatory governance expectations, and dismantled state advocacy infrastructure without transparent explanation?
The numbers do not justify the method. They instead reveal a deeper concern: a top-down governance decision carried out without regard for NASW’s own Code of Ethics.
When Voice Requires Risk
“There is no greater agony than bearing an untold story inside you.”
— Maya Angelou
Directors and leaders who reached out did not only describe disagreement. They described grief.
One person wrote about spending years building legislative relationships, then learning of their termination only when the public announcement went out. Another described watching their board resign in protest while being bound by confidentiality agreements that limited what they could say publicly.
The termination of fourteen executive directors severed years of relational trust with legislators, coalitions, community partners, and state agencies. It also revealed a deeper dynamic: critiquing NASW National now carries professional risk.
Current staff shared concerns about job security and potential retaliation. Former staff referenced NDAs and policies warning of legal consequences for sharing internal information. Chapter leaders described calculating how public they could be without jeopardizing future opportunities.
Social workers are trained to speak truth to power. When they feel unable to do that within their own professional home, the issue is not individual courage. It is organizational culture.
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What Social Workers Shared Privately
Across direct messages, emails, comment threads, and anonymous forums, several themes repeated with striking consistency:
Betrayal of professional values
Social workers asked how an organization that teaches transparency can function without it. Many referenced the Code of Ethics directly. One former director wrote: “I taught students about ethical decision-making for years. Now I’m watching our own association make decisions I would have told students to challenge.”
Loss of advocacy capacity
State-level advocacy cannot be centralized without cost. It is relationship-based. It requires local trust and daily presence. Directors who built those relationships over years were removed with no transition planning. Practitioners worried about coalitions, policy campaigns, and community partnerships that depend on steady local leadership.
Fear of retaliation
This theme dominated. Not primarily anger or outrage, but fear. People described deleting posts after second thoughts, moving conversations into private messages, or choosing anonymous forums because they felt safer. A current chapter leader wrote: “I know what happened was wrong. I also know I can’t say that publicly without risking my position.”
Organizational trauma and grief
Many used language of loss, rupture, and betrayal. They spoke of years of work made irrelevant overnight. They described watching an institution that was supposed to protect their advocacy instead dismantle the infrastructure that made it possible.
The Silence Is the Story
For every public statement, there were several private messages. Comments appeared, then disappeared. Former staff wrote publicly, then removed their posts. Reddit became one of the few places where practitioners could speak without attaching their names.
Silence, in this context, is not neutrality. It is evidence of power. When people believe that telling the truth about their experience may cost them their livelihood, silence becomes protective. The profession should be deeply concerned any time silence is the safest choice.
When Public Messaging Contradicts Private Reality
On December 9, a document appeared on Reddit, shared by someone identifying as a recently resigned NASW chapter board member. The post included an email from NASW National leadership dated December 8, which I have since independently verified through direct communication with affected parties.
In that message, NASW leadership asserts that the restructuring was neither sudden nor reactive, but the result of “nearly a decade” of planning, pilots, and incremental testing. The communication frames the consolidation of 14 chapters as necessary operational modernization rather than an ethical rupture or governance breakdown. It directs members to board minutes and Form 990 filings as evidence of transparency and due process.
The response from the community has been swift and skeptical. The resigned board member characterizes the messaging not as clarification, but as post-hoc justification, writing:
“To put the blame on social workers for not being ‘informed enough’ is simply ludicrous”.
Others in the discussion attempted to verify the leadership’s claims of long-term transparency. One user noted that publicly available board minutes on the NASW website appear to extend only through January of this year. This leaves the claim of a “decade of planning” effectively unverifiable to the average member.
This critique does not hinge on whether restructuring was necessary. It hinges on timing and access. In trauma-informed systems, transparency is not a courtesy extended afterward; it is the process that precedes impact.
Public messaging that invokes openness while leaving members unable to verify foundational claims creates the mistrust it seeks to quiet. In social work, transparency is not merely disclosure of outcomes. It is shared process, shared risk, and the ability to ask questions without consequence.
What is most striking is the contrast. Leadership points to board minutes and filings as evidence of transparency, yet those materials appear incomplete and the financial record (as shown above) contradicts claims of necessity. This is transparency as performance, not practice.
The restructuring may have been justified. The communication culture that surrounded it was not. That is the ethical breach that continues to reverberate.
Governance, Stewardship, and Professional Legitimacy
This is no longer only a crisis about restructuring. It is a crisis of credibility and stewardship.
In nonprofit governance, three duties are foundational: duty of care, duty of loyalty, and duty of obedience. These duties belong to an organization’s governing board at the national level, not its executives.
When an organization’s Vice President, who serves on the National Board, describes facing pressure to resign after raising concerns related to governance and transparency, it signals a serious breach of fiduciary responsibility. Board members are obligated to ask hard questions and act in the best interest of the organization’s mission, even when doing so is uncomfortable or unpopular.
Separately, when chapter boards resign in full, they are not simply rebelling. They are signaling that they can no longer participate in governance under a structure they believe undermines transparency, ethical practice, and meaningful accountability to members.
An association cannot ask its members to uphold a Code of Ethics it ignores in its own operations. Doing so undermines the moral authority of our entire profession.
Clinical Drift in Organizational Form
Macro practice teaches that institutions must be accountable to the communities they serve. Social workers learn to analyze systems, challenge harmful power dynamics, and build participatory structures.
If social workers cannot successfully advocate within their own professional association, how do we maintain credibility when we advocate in legislatures, agencies, and communities? If chapter leaders fear retaliation for naming concerns, how do we encourage practitioners to challenge injustice elsewhere?
This moment is not separate from the broader trend of clinical drift. When the national association centralizes power, restricts participation, and treats member voice as a risk to manage rather than a resource to cultivate, it enacts the same individualizing tendencies that have pulled the profession away from macro work.
A professional body that silences dissent cannot credibly train people in community organizing. An association that treats governance as an internal matter rather than a shared practice cannot credibly promote democratic participation.
The restructuring is not only a symptom of clinical drift. It is clinical drift expressed through organizational design.
What Ethical Accountability Requires
Repair is impossible in an environment of silence. Silence protects those who hold institutional power and isolates those who have been harmed.
Ethical accountability would require, at minimum:
- Clear public explanation of the restructuring decision, including the financial and strategic analysis that drove it and the alternatives considered.
- Transparent reporting on the Preferra insurance collapse and the use of insurance-related funds.
- Open forums where members, staff, and chapter leaders can process what has happened without fear of retaliation.
- Restoration or thoughtful redesign of state-level advocacy capacity that respects the importance of local leadership and relationships.
- Independent review of retaliation, intimidation, and workplace climate concerns raised by past and present staff.
- Governance reforms that prevent major structural changes from being enacted without meaningful consultation with chapters and members.
These are not radical demands. They are the minimum for ethical stewardship in any mission-driven organization. They are especially important in a profession that teaches transparency, participation, and accountability as core practice principles.
Honoring Those Who Cannot Speak
Many of the people most affected by these decisions are constrained by contracts, risk calculations, or ongoing roles inside the organization. Professionals who have given decades to advocacy and leadership deserve acknowledgment and ethical clarity, even if they cannot safely share their stories in public.
This article is, in part, an attempt to honor that reality. It draws on what has been said publicly and on what has been shared privately, without attaching names where doing so could create harm.
If you have insight, concern, or experience related to the restructuring or to NASW governance more broadly, I welcome confidential conversation at hello@themacrolens.com. Not for publication, but to better understand the collective landscape that has brought the profession to this moment.
The Stakes for the Profession
The profession of social work cannot afford selective accountability. We cannot insist on transparency from agencies, courts, and legislators while accepting opacity from our own institutions. We cannot teach ethical courage in classrooms while expecting quiet compliance in our professional associations.
The silence surrounding NASW’s restructuring is beginning to break. What happens next will reveal whether institutional power chooses defensiveness or the ethical courage that social work has long claimed to embody.
NASW faces a clear choice: commit to meaningful governance reform, or accept continued erosion of credibility and trust.
There is no third option.
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