The Time Is Right for Arts in Social Work

By Lori Power, EdD, MSW

“Art is the signature of civilization.” — Beverly Sills

“Art, freedom, and creativity will change society faster than politics.” — Victor Pinchuk

In keeping with this year’s theme for National Social Work Month, “The Time Is Right for Social Work,” I would like to add a dimension: The time is right for arts in social work. Social work has the arts at its very roots; Ellen Gates Starr and Jane Addams had a strong commitment to arts and community, and social work has continued that tradition, in a small way, since our beginnings.

We are now in a time of unprecedented worldwide social upheaval with economic oppression: a changing climate, a global pandemic, military aggression, human displacement, and cultural and ideological conflict. In 2022, the Black Lives Matter movement is more vital than ever, and the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed to many of us our own and each other’s vulnerabilities.

Suddenly, everyone is talking about what true quality of life means. Many workers have come to value their own essential work, and others of us have opened our eyes to the work of teachers and nurses. We are widely discussing the topics of public health, loneliness, and individual and collective trauma. We have all felt what it’s like to be isolated and scared and grieving and uncertain of our own health and our loved ones’ futures.

All of this is to say that our society is in a period of rethinking, reconfiguring, or even just exploring new ways of creating the world in a better way. The arts contain an immense potential to frame public discourse. The time is right!

The NASW Code of Ethics tells us that we have an ethical responsibility to engage in advocacy as well as clinical practice. As a profession, we can and must focus beyond individual need and look upstream to address disparities and other forms of injustice. Significantly, the Code of Ethics states, “These activities seek to promote sensitivity to and knowledge about oppression and cultural and ethnic diversity.”

This mandate does not have to be limited to policy advocacy in the traditional sense. The arts, such as theater, fiction writing, film making, light projections, meme production, and such can be used as 21st-century approaches to changing the public consciousness. Symbols, stories, movies, and music have the power to evoke strong emotions that transcend divisive language and generate empathy for others’ plights. This leads people to think and talk about phenomena in new ways. In fact, I contend that art is more powerful than any political policy in helping people connect with one another during difficult times, heal from collective trauma, and initiate a willingness to engage in new ways of thinking.

Lately, I’ve been thinking about fusion. Not the nuclear kind, but the kind that involves taking two separate ideas and blending them together to make something original and new. This is the essence of creativity, and the time may well be right for us to incorporate more creativity into our social work practice.

For example, one of the greatest challenges of the 21st century is climate change. There are a number of social workers engaging in climate and environmental work, but as a profession we tend not to think of the actual, physical environment when we talk about “person-in-environment.” Generally speaking, with that orientation, we are thinking about the local, familial, and cultural environment that a person may be embedded in and less so the Earth itself. Yet climate change and other environmental degradations currently and directly affect vulnerable people, not to mention future generations.

So why not use the arts to make the invisible visible, such as the impact of climate change on marginalized communities around the globe, or a vision of what the Earth could look like for our children and grandchildren? These depictions could be in the form of stories, movies, images, or myriad other possibilities. We can use social media to share it, along with more traditional venues such as street arts, museums, bookshops, and theaters.

If we are not artists ourselves, we can collaborate with them to address many national and community issues such as racism, oppression of women and girls, prison reform, the struggles of immigrants and refugees, trans rights, and so many others. With new, collective consciousness comes new approaches, including policies and laws.

Social workers are the largest providers of mental health services in the United States. With mental health being addressed more openly, let’s take advantage of this momentum and build upon the current racial, economic, and environmental reckoning. The time is right for arts in social work!

— Lori Power, EdD, MSW, is a faculty member in the School of Social Work and the coordinator of the Applied Arts and Social Justice Certificate at the University of New England in Portland, ME.