The Macro Lens

Category: Personal Reflections

  • NASW Restructuring and Ethical Accountability: When Chapters Stand Up To Leadership

    Illustration of a suited figure labeled NASW holding the Code of Ethics near a lit lighter, symbolizing ethical risk associated with NASW restructuring.

    Due to the extraordinary response to this article, and the number of professionals who voiced fears around voicing their concerns publicly, I decided to write a follow up article. You can read it here.

    Social workers across the country are concerned, confused, and angry. How can the organization that claims to represent us, the steward of our Code of Ethics, so blatantly violate the values it taught generations of practitioners to defend?

    Last month, national leadership executed sweeping NASW restructuring, resulting in the leaders serving fourteen state chapters being laid off. Many learned of their eliminations at the moment the announcement became public. No transition plans, no member consultation, no collaborative process, and no opportunity for affected chapters to prepare for the loss of their advocacy infrastructure.

    For a membership organization in a profession built on community voice, this was not merely an internal decision. It was an ethical rupture.

    The response was immediate. Iowa issued a vote of no confidence. Kansas publicly stated they were given no rationale or process for the removal of their leadership. Arkansas and Kentucky reported full board resignations. Former directors expressed not only shock, but grief that the relational work of years could be severed without forethought, acknowledgment, or transparency.

    These reactions are not isolated. They are a collective recognition that something fundamental has cracked at the center of our professional home.

    The Values NASW Forgot to Practice

    The execution of the NASW restructuring reflects a fundamental disconnect with our professional values. Social work rests on transparency, accountability, and shared decision making. We teach these principles to students. We write them into policies. We defend them in courtrooms, classrooms, community centers, legislatures, and crisis shelters. They are not aspirational ideals. For many, they are deeply intertwined with our professional and personal identity.

    Yet national leadership made sweeping decisions about chapter consolidation and layoffs without meaningful consultation with members, chapter boards, state leaders, or the Delegate Assembly. What was removed was not only staffing, but presence. Not only roles, but relationships. Not only operations, but the connective tissue of state-level advocacy.

    Paying lip service to our professional values is not enough. We cannot abide a professional organization that refuses to hold itself to the same standards it demands from its members.

    This is why Iowa’s action matters. Their statement was not an act of rebellion, but of fidelity. They spoke not out of hostility, but out of moral obligation.

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    Betrayal, Not Disagreement

    It is important to name the emotional truth of this moment. Social workers are not simply upset about process. They are wounded by betrayal.

    Directors like Becky Fast did not hold symbolic roles. They built coalitions, strengthened legislative relationships, and carried advocacy work forward for years in a profession that often erases that labor. To remove them without partnership or dialogue was not a technical oversight. It was a dismissal of what makes this profession function at the state level: trust, time, continuity, and presence.

    The problem is not that NASW made a difficult decision. It is that they made it in a way that violated the relational and ethical commitments that define social work as a profession. We are asked, in every setting, to confront power responsibly, inclusively, and accountably. When NASW leadership bypassed those values, it modeled the very behavior social workers are trained to challenge in systems of harm.

    That disconnect is what social workers feel so viscerally now. Not a policy disagreement, but the sting of hypocrisy.

    The Importance of Iowa’s Stand

    Iowa’s statement did not emerge from impulse. As someone who has served on that board, I can attest to the deliberation, restraint, and ethical seriousness with which they operate.

    This was more than a critical response to a single action from NASW leadership. They were calling out a concerning, sustained pattern of behavior. They cited opaque decision making, lack of disclosure concerning the Preferra lawsuit and loss of member benefits, and alleged retaliation against volunteers and staff who raised concerns.

    Their vote of no confidence reflects the gravity of what has unfolded. NASW leadership repeatedly acted in blatant violation of the professional values they hold sacred. Their alarm is not dramatic, but a measured and appropriate response.

    This is exactly the level of clarity, courage, and integrity we should expect from leadership within our field. The actions of state chapters like Iowa make the failures of national leadership all the more apparent.

    Social workers know how to sit with discomfort, how to speak truth to power, and how to hold systems accountable. We expect that of ourselves. We have the right to demand that of NASW.

    Where Trust Goes From Here

    The NASW restructuring reveals a fundamental misunderstanding of how state-level advocacy works. Legislative relationships cannot be managed remotely. Grassroots organizing requires local presence. Policy change demands sustained engagement with specific communities, agencies, and political contexts. Efficiency models that treat advocacy as scalable administrative work will hollow out the very infrastructure that makes social work more than clinical licensing.

    Trust between NASW and its members cannot be restored through email statements, public relations language, or internal talking points. Trust can only be rebuilt through action that reflects the values the profession is named after: transparency, collaboration, and shared leadership.

    Social workers are not asking for perfection. They are asking for participation. They are asking to be included in decisions that redefine their professional landscape. They are asking that their expertise, advocacy relationships, and labor be recognized and respected.

    The profession must demand more from the organizations that claim to represent us. NASW cannot champion justice while practicing exclusion. It cannot require accountability from practitioners while denying it in its own operations. It cannot claim stewardship of values it fails to uphold.

    Social workers deserve better than this. We are better than this.

    The profession deserves an organization that reflects the best of who we are, not the worst of what hierarchy can become.

    If you enjoyed this article, check out our foundational articles: Why Us?, Why Now?, and How? Be sure to subscribe for monthly updates and resources.

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  • Suffering in Plain Sight: How Child Welfare’s Institutional Amnesia Failed My Brothers

    Two boys, approximately ages nine and twelve, sit dejected on concrete steps in a black and white urban scene, symbolizing the instability and invisibility children face under caseworker turnover.

    This piece continues the personal story I began in My Why, where I share the experiences that shaped my commitment to macro social work and empowering lived experience leaders.

    The US child welfare system is deeply flawed. For many children, the greatest and most lasting harm does not come from the events that triggered involvement, but from the system itself. Caseworker turnover and the revolving door of service providers creates a cycle of instability. Each new professional asks children to recount their trauma, and each transition erases the understanding the previous worker painstakingly built.

    I did not come by this truth through research or policy reports. It was hard won, advocating for my half-brothers as the system lost sight of their needs time and time again. Same children, same histories, same needs, yet every new caseworker treated them as blank slates. Each transition meant starting over, because the child welfare system could not remember.

    When Systems Forget

    In 2018, my youngest brothers entered Iowa’s child welfare system for the second time and were placed in my care. The removal itself followed familiar patterns; crisis, intervention, placement. What came after, however, was something more insidious: institutional amnesia.

    The revolving door of service providers began almost immediately. Caseworkers changed. Service coordinators came and went. Each transition brought the same exhausting ritual. New faces asking old questions, requesting information already documented. Strangers forming impressions without context, making decisions that contradicted previous plans.

    It felt like we were starting over from scratch every time their caseworker changed, because we were.

    The system wasn’t just failing to build on existing knowledge. It was actively forgetting what it had already learned about my brothers’ specific needs and trauma histories. Each new professional entered with good intentions but without institutional memory. Armed with case files but missing the lived context that makes those files meaningful.

    The Permanency Plan That Wasn’t

    The worst manifestation of this amnesia came during the transition between the second and third caseworkers on my brothers’ case.

    After more than two years of active child welfare involvement, we finally had a plan. The second caseworker had been critical of my stepmother’s ability to maintain a healthy and positive relationship with the boys. Given the infrequency of visitation and ongoing mental health struggles, he recommended termination of parental rights and my adoption of my brothers.

    At the time, I agreed. He presented a compelling argument, and I trusted his professional opinion. After years of uncertainty, it looked like my brothers would finally have permanency. They could stop holding their breath in anticipation. We could all exhale.

    Then the third caseworker took over.

    During our first conversation, she asked what I wanted to see regarding permanency. Trusting the established plan, I repeated the previous worker’s recommendation of termination and adoption. She didn’t push back. She didn’t comment on it at all.

    Instead, her initial report to the court stated that my “adversarial regard” for my stepmother was harmful the boys. She further recommended that the case should not close until this issue was resolved. She painted me as a harmful agent in my brothers’ lives for the sin of trusting her predecessor’s plan.

    The light at the end of the tunnel was effectively snuffed out, as we started over from scratch yet again.

    Right Outcome, Wrong Method

    Despite that initial antagonistic treatment, I am actually grateful to the third caseworker. Her perspective helped myself and the court recognize the value of the relationship between my brothers and their mother. The case ultimately closed with my stepmother retaining parental rights while I became permanent guardian. My brothers gained stability with me while maintaining a safe and meaningful relationship with their mother. Looking back, it was the best possible outcome.

    But being right doesn’t excuse the methods.

    Had the third caseworker approached me openly, I would have seen the logic and validity of this permanency option. I would have supported it from the start. Her choice to leave me in the dark and paint me as an aggressor was unnecessary, frustrating, and further eroded my trust in the child welfare system.

    This is the insidious nature of institutional amnesia: it doesn’t just lose information, it loses trust.

    The Human Cost of Starting Over

    For my brothers, this nearly three-year case felt like perpetual limbo. Each caseworker transition brought fresh waves of uncertainty about their future. It meant new strangers making decisions about their lives and repeated questions about painful histories.

    The consequences lingered long after the child welfare case closed. My youngest brother lived in a state of emotional limbo for years. The system’s inconsistent messaging around permanency left him uncertain, even after closure. He continued to put his life on hold. He avoided forming friendships, joining activities, or putting down roots in his new community.

    I remember when, nearly two years after the case ended, he finally began to come out of his shell. He made friends at school, planned sleepovers, and became excited about his life again. It was a joyful shift, but it underscored the cost of years spent waiting for an outcome that would never come.

    If the system had provided consistency around permanency from the beginning, I believe he would have acclimated much sooner. The years of his childhood lost were not inevitable, they were preventable.

    The One Who Remembered

    There was one critical exception to this institutional amnesia: my brothers’ Court Appointed Special Advocate (CASA).

    Assigned at the onset of my brothers’ case, the CASA volunteer became their constant through nearly three years of system chaos. While caseworkers rotated and service providers changed, she remained. She was the only agent of the system that my brothers truly trusted. The one adult who showed up, who remembered, and who actually saw them.

    She was a godsend, providing the continuity that the formal system failed to maintain. She knew their story not from case notes but from relationship. When new caseworkers entered, she could provide context that files couldn’t capture. When permanency plans shifted, she was the bridge helping my brothers make sense of changes that adults struggled to explain.

    I am forever grateful to my brothers’ CASA. Her involvement in their case inspired me to spend three years as a CASA volunteer myself. I later dedicated my graduate practicum to the CASA program, designing and piloting a comprehensive data system to better track child outcomes, needs, and the systemic barriers they face. This was my first direct effort to ensure the needs of other children and families did not remain invisible, as my brothers’ once had.

    The Systemic Design Flaw

    This is not a story about bad caseworkers, but that of a system designed to fail.

    The professionals involved in my brothers’ case were dedicated, competent people doing their best within impossible constraints. Every one of them cared deeply about my brothers’ wellbeing.

    The problem is that child welfare is designed as if children exist in a perpetual present. As if each assessment captures a stable truth rather than a moment in a long narrative.

    Case files document decisions, but not the reasoning behind them. They record permanency plans, but not the dynamics, observations, and deliberation that shaped those plans. When workers leave, all of that vital context disappears. New workers inherit conclusions without understanding how they were reached.

    This creates a perverse dynamic where each new worker, lacking context, feels compelled to form their own independent judgment rather than risk perpetuating a predecessor’s mistakes. The result is what my family experienced. Not thoughtful course corrections based on new information, but wholesale abandonment of existing plans because the reasoning behind them died when the worker left.

    What Research Tells Us

    An ethnographic study of day to day child protection work helps explain why caseworker turnover and inconsistent staffing are so damaging. The research found that effective child welfare practice depends on intimate engagement with children. It requires the ability to enter a child’s world through careful listening, observation, and relational depth. This level of practice requires sufficient preparation time, organizational support, and reflective supervision. Without these conditions, workers quickly become overwhelmed or cognitively overloaded. The emotional and relational grounding that meaningful assessment requires becomes impossible to maintain.

    The study also found that many workers arrive at visits in a bureaucratically preoccupied state. They are still mentally tethered to administrative demands, computer screens, or the pressure to complete tasks quickly. This state of mind makes it difficult to engage deeply with children or to absorb the sensory and emotional complexity of family environments. When workers lack reflective containment, they struggle to process the anxiety, conflict, or emotional intensity they encounter. This leads to rushed interactions, superficial assessments, and a reliance on procedural checklists rather than thoughtful relational practice.

    The research emphasizes that this is not a matter of individual competence. The same workers practiced skillfully in some cases and detached in others, depending on the emotional demands they faced and the organizational support they received. Caseworker turnover forces workers to start from deficit. They lack the contextual and relational foundations required to truly understand the children in their care.

    Rebuilding Systems That Remember

    If we want child welfare to function, we need more than better documentation or reduced caseloads. We need systems built on the assumption that caseworker turnover will occur, so children do not pay the price.

    A number of promising approaches already exist:

    • Team based models that distribute knowledge across multiple workers.
    • Narrative focused documentation that preserves both decisions and the reasoning behind them.
    • Supervision structures that provide the containment workers need to think clearly and maintain child centered focus.
    • CASA programs that offer relational continuity that agencies struggle to provide.

    These innovations are real, but they are also far from systemic.

    From Amnesia to Accountability

    My brothers are mostly grown now. The final permanency plan served them well, and they are thriving. However, the harm from the system’s inconsistency still matters. They lived with adults repeatedly disagreeing about their future. Professionals disappeared from their lives without explanation. Promises shifted without warning.

    Those experiences shaped them as much as the trauma that led to removal.

    This understanding is the foundation of The Macro Lens. Lived experience is essential to systemic reform. Relationships are not soft skills, they are infrastructure. Systems must be redesigned by those who have lived their consequences.

    Institutional memory is not optional. When systems forget children’s stories, they lose the children themselves.

    Child welfare will continue to fail until we build systems that remember with intention. Ones that protect continuity as fiercely as safety, and recognize that every lost piece of knowledge becomes a wound the next worker must rediscover.

    My brothers deserved a system that built on what it learned, not one that forgot with every transition. So do the thousands of children experiencing discontinuity whenever a caseworker’s email auto reply announces they have moved on.

    To build systems that remember children, we must elevate those who know what it is to be forgotten.

    To learn more about the experiences and commitments that shape my work at The Macro Lens, visit the About Me page.

  • My Why: From Trauma to Purpose

    Purple daisy growing through cracked concrete, symbolizing macro social work resilience and systemic change.

    How I Found Macro Social Work

    My path to social work was not paved in gold but in trauma. A series of life events left those I love in deep suffering. In their hour of need, I placed my faith in the very institutions meant to protect us. I expected compassion. I expected justice. Instead, I was met with silence. Rather than healing, those systems served to deepen the wounds.

    Few things are more terrible than watching those you love suffer while you stand powerless. That powerlessness almost broke me. For months, I carried that weight like a stone in my chest, replaying every failure, every silence, every closed door.

    Finding My Purpose

    As I processed everything that had happened, I began to see that my family’s experience was far from unique. It was as though a veil had been lifted from my eyes, forever altering my perception. Suddenly, the deep flaws inherent to every societal system, from criminal justice and child welfare to healthcare and education, became impossible to ignore.

    It was in this place of new clarity that I stumbled upon a quote by Henri Nouwen:

    “Nobody escapes being wounded. We are all wounded people, whether physically, emotionally, mentally, or spiritually. The main question is not “How can we hide our wounds?” so we don’t have to be embarrassed, but “How can we put our woundedness in the service of others?” When our wounds cease to be a source of shame, and become a source of healing, we have become wounded healers.”

    This concept of the wounded healer reframed everything. I began to see that what had almost broken me could be transformed into a compass and a purpose. I realized that while I couldn’t change the past, I could choose to make meaning from it. This trauma could become a source of healing, not just for me, but for others.

    My purpose became crystal clear: To do everything in my power to address the systemic flaws my experience had laid bare and protect others from the suffering my loved ones had endured. I just needed to find a career path that would allow me to effect this kind of change.

    Finding My “How”

    I spent months researching and soul-searching. Each career path I considered felt lacking. Public Administration could effect systemic change, but it felt cold and bureaucratic. A law degree could expand legal protections for vulnerable populations, but it wouldn’t address the underlying systemic issues that bring them to the legal system in the first place.

    Each path I explored fell short of the scope of my mission until a friend suggested I consider social work. I had only ever known it as a profession for therapists and child welfare workers, but I promised to take a closer look.

    As I researched, I felt an immediate connection to the profession. The core values of service, justice, dignity, equity, and integrity aligned perfectly with my own values and purpose. I was amazed by the breadth of the social work profession and was introduced to macro social workers, professionals committed to addressing social justice issues through systems work. It was everything I had been searching for, and more.

    In that moment, something in the depths of my being clicked into place. I knew immediately I had found my calling. I had never been so sure of anything in my life. I would dedicate my life to protecting the vulnerable from systems that perpetuate harm, and I would do so through social work.

    From Calling to Community

    Since that decision, every step on this path has reinforced my conviction. I have created programs at nonprofits and state agencies aimed at addressing community inequities, developed and piloted a data system for the Iowa CASA program, and worked directly to create behavioral supports for children in the public education system. I’ve witnessed the resilience of communities, the creativity of advocates, and the courage of colleagues, all of which have strengthened my belief in the possibility of systemic change.

    While I still carry the weight of the experiences that led me here, every program I develop, policy I improve, and individual I help eases that burden a little more.

    This is my why. It is why I believe in the power of social work and why I am so committed to social justice and systemic change. It is why I believe this profession is meant for more than managing broken systems: We are called to change them. Finally, it is why I created The Macro Lens. I hope to build a community of like-minded social workers and allies, providing the support, resources, and inspiration needed to effect change in our systems and communities.

    I hope you will join me in the effort to create a more just and equitable future for everyone.

    If you enjoyed this article, check out our foundational articles: Why Us?, Why Now?, and How? Be sure to subscribe for monthly updates and resources.