Transformation: Bring Forth a New Generation of Asian Americans in Social Work and the Helping Professions

Notes responding to Dr. Kenny Kwong’s “Asian-American Social Workers’ Career. Stress, and Well-Being Study” by Steve Yip, November 15, 2019

Let’s start from the end backwards: Dr. Kenny Kwong’s conclusion that “Maintaining recruitment and retention of Asian-American social workers may require changes not only in social work education but also in the culture, practices, and conditions of their employment,” deserves further dialogue and action.

In order to advance, sustain and support a growing cohort of Asian and Asian American social work professionals, we need to initiate and cultivate a significant cultural shift, a transformation.

• According to many, social workers, in general, are relatively low on the professional totem pole. They make less than most teachers. For immigrant families, social work does not appear to be a lucrative or respected profession.
• Many people go into social work to be a clinical therapist. A therapist can run their own business and work in a hospital and has attracted students who are not into following a social justice code of ethics. Many of these students do not understand the importance of public policy and its impact on populations traditionally served by social workers.
• Social workers, like teachers, are major elements of socialization of society. However, their practices are “paternalistic” in dictating middle-class American values to poor communities, and more often than not, social workers and other helping professionals are used as police in many child welfare situations.
• While some social work values are shifting toward social justice, and recognizing the need for “self-determination” for clients, there remain deep tensions in the work in negotiating through a system of inequality and oppression with many social workers complicit in harming communities. Traditional social work remains rooted in white middle-class paternalism, from which it emerged as a profession.
• There is a fine line between being an activist or advocate and with delivering services, and that is difficult to balance and to navigate.
• While many nonprofit leaders come from social work background and training, there is a dichotomy between those social workers on front line direct service and those who are in policy or in clinical practice.

These are my perceptions of the contradictions confronting Asian American (and other) social work professionals. How a large organization deals with them does not meet the shifting necessities in today’s highly toxic political environment where groups of disadvantaged peoples are criminalized and demonized.

Social workers who take up the ethos of “Serve The People,” is much needed. We need social workers and those in related fields (public health, etc.) to emerge with a new moral compass on serving our communities — this includes Asian Americans, Asian immigrant professionals, and non-Asian professionals who find their calling in serving the Asian American and Asian ethnic communities.

We need to bring forth a new generation of Asian American social work professionals, who are not only multilingual and multicultural, but who have embraced this new ethos of serving the people, of social justice, and to model this when interacting with clients, community members and colleagues.

How do we do this? We need to loft a new value system that pipelines young people with the vision and mission of social justice and advocacy that will be organic with direct service, and/or the maintenance of services.

We need to cultivate programs that groom potential social work professionals from early on who embrace the need to go beyond “giving back to the community.”

We need to initiate a rigorous conversation between CBO’s, independent professional advocacy organizations like this one, and social work schools.

Thus social work professionals can be a force as change agents while providing direct service to disadvantaged populations who are continually under stress.

To begin a transformation, we need to incubate, groom and sustain a proactive and supportive environment to promote dedicated (and also multilingual) social work and public health (and other caring) professionals, who may or may not be Asian, but find themselves dedicating aspects of their lives to the AAPI communities.