A message to my students and social workers everywhere
Today is World Social Work Day. I am writing from Kamloops, British Columbia, on the unceded territory of the Secwépemc people, with a full heart and a deep sense of gratitude.
Gratitude, first, to the IFSW, IASSW, EASSW, for their inspiring message this year, a reminder that across every border, every language, every tradition, we are bound together by one shared commitment: to stand with people, to insist on dignity, and to build the world we know is possible.
And gratitude — always — to you. Every student who sat in a classroom with me. Every colleague who stayed in this work when leaving would have been easier. Every community that refused to be abandoned. Over twenty years and more than 7,000 students across five Canadian universities, I have come to understand something I say with full conviction: you have taught me more than I have ever taught you.
Harambee: More Than a Word
This year’s theme, Co-creating Hope and Harmony, carries the spirit of Harambee, the Swahili principle of pulling together, of shared responsibility and collective action. It is not only a word. It is a philosophy our profession has always lived, even before we had a name for it.
In my courses on Canadian Social Policy, Field Education, and Educating for Social Change, I return again and again to a truth that every student eventually names for themselves: we do not heal in isolation. The wounds are collective. And so must be the care.
Harambee calls us to look at war, including the war still raging in Ukraine, and choose solidarity over silence. It calls us to look at displacement, poverty, and intergenerational trauma and choose presence over retreat. It calls us, as the EASSW so beautifully put it, to co-create hope, not to wait for it to arrive.
Building on What Came Before
Two years ago, on World Social Work Day 2024, I reflected on Buen Vivir, the indigenous Andean vision of good living, of harmony between people and the earth. I wrote about its challenge to individualism, extractivism, and the structures that separate us from one another.
Harambee 2026 does not replace that wisdom. It deepens it. Where Buen Vivir asks how shall we live, Harambee asks with whom? Who are we in relationship to? Who do we leave behind when we move forward alone?
These questions live at the heart of the Social G*R*A*C*E*S* framework, the pedagogical tool I have been building with my students for twenty years, now encompassing 105 dimensions of human identity and social experience. Every dimension is a name for someone left out, unseen, whose belonging was conditional. Harambee is the answer to every one of them: you are not alone. We pull together.
Love · Care · Share: The DROKACADEMY Way
At DROKACADEMY, I speak of three commitments that I believe are also the heart of social work itself:
LOVE — not sentiment, but the radical act of seeing another person fully. Refusing to reduce them to their crisis or their category. This is what we practice in every intake, every home visit, every classroom discussion.
CARE — not charity, but presence. The willingness to stay, to listen across difference, to hold complexity without flinching. Care is what my students bring when they share their lived experience in a classroom and trust that it matters. Care is what social workers bring when they return to the same community for the tenth time, still believing change is possible.
SHARE — knowledge, power, platform, and story. The Social G*R*A*C*E*S* framework grew not because I built it alone, but because thousands of students shared what I could not see. Sharing is the antidote to hierarchy. It is the pedagogy of Harambee.
When I think of the social workers I know, working in remote northern communities, in refugee resettlement, in harm reduction, in hospice, in schools and shelters and clinics, I see people who embody all three. Every day, without sufficient recognition, pay, or rest, they love, care, and share.
Today is for them. Today is for you.
The Candle Burns
Last December, on Human Rights Day, I shared what I called a prayer, the Discrimination Elimination Social Justice Prayer, built across all 105 dimensions of the Social G*R*A*C*E*S* framework. I wrote that it belongs to my students as much as to me. That it is a living document. That it will keep growing because you keep teaching me.
I believe the same is true of our profession. Social work is a living document. Written by Dorothea Dix, Ida B. Wells, and Jane Addams. By residential school survivors who taught us the difference between help and harm. By queer youth who walked into our offices and taught us the difference between acceptance and safety. By newcomers who taught us that grief for a homeland has no translation. By elders who taught us that wisdom does not always arrive in academic language.
And by my students in Manitoba, Nova Scotia, Ontario, Northern BC, and here in Kamloops, who are now practicing across Canada and globally, who sat with hard questions long enough to change them.
I will not pretend hope is easy today. Ukraine still bleeds. Climate grief is real. Students are arriving in our classrooms carrying more weight than any generation I have taught before.
And yet, Harambee. We pull together.
In my Ukrainian community, we say: свічка горить, the candle burns. We say it at gatherings. We say it in memory. We say it in hope.
On this World Social Work Day, I ask you to light one, literally or metaphorically, for:
- The student who is the first in their family to study social work
- The field supervisor who stayed late and never got thanked
- The social worker who keeps showing up despite everything
- The community that refused to be abandoned
- Ukraine. Iran. Every place that needs the world to pull together.
With respect,
Sasha
Leave a Reply