Moving Together Towards Safe(R) Praxis

A report from the College’s public interest committees

The Nova Scotia College of Social Workers relies upon the wisdom and input of its members. Dozens of members volunteer on our public interest committees, including social workers who are actively employed and retired, experienced practitioners and candidates, and even social work students, each bringing their diverse personal and professional experiences.

Together these volunteers ensure that our different committees’ deliberations are grounded in the needs and concerns of our members, as we seek to implement our profession’s Code of Ethics and our commitments to truth and reconciliation, as well as integrating the findings of recent reports highlighting our need to advocate for antiracist and anti-oppressive lenses to ensure safe(R) social work practice.

Our guidelines and policies, programming and advocacy, activities and events are all guided by diverse perspectives, with input from external subject matter experts, including those with lived experiences.

Our diverse committees sometimes work individually, but increasingly in collaboration with one another and in consultation with the communities that we seek to serve. We are especially grateful for the wisdom and support of Elder Ella Paul of Millbrook First Nation for sharing her time with us in 2023.

Public interest committees meet once or twice a month, and also in small work group project teams. Some members have joined other committees to provide additional support and assist with integrating the ideas from one group to another. Committee chairs and co-chairs also met several times over the year to discuss and align their efforts, and to support the growing collaborative efforts of these diverse committees. And we held our first virtual committee retreat in the fall of 2023, to help guide our future efforts.

Connections Committee

The connections committee completed its final printed edition of Connection magazine in 2023 and began to reimagine how it can continue to evolve in its commitment to telling the stories that connect our membership with one another and with the broader community we serve. We are grateful to our chair, Rachel Smith, RSW, for all that she has done to support our small but mighty committee during these significant changes.

The final issue of 2023 focused upon the decolonization of the social work profession and highlighted the incredible work that Mi’kmaq and Indigenous social workers are doing. We featured the first Mi’kmaq social worker who was registered as a private practice clinician, Michelle Peters, RSW, PP, and published articles intended to support our members as we work to decolonize ourselves and our profession, in solidarity with our Indigenous members and the Mi’kmaq communities and Elders upon whose land we live and work.

We are especially proud of our article on land acknowledgment praxis, which interwove the knowledge of multiple social workers of both Indigenous and settler descent. Many non-profits and others in our communities have shared with us how transformational this article was for their understanding of how to be better treaty partners and how to demonstrate that commitment in their own land acknowledgments.

This committee’s focus in 2023 was to reimagine what this magazine might look like in a new format, where the stories we tell can be shared in a more flexible way. In particular, given the changing ways that our world consumes media, our College has decided to shift our magazine to an online format.

The committee has spent a significant amount of time reflecting upon the best ways to adapt to this change and to find new ways of telling our stories and sharing our values.

Connection Magazine began as a newsletter back in 1966 when the College (then Association) was just three years old, and later transformed into a full-colour magazine that was shared widely across the province. Each phase of Connection has reflected the College’s evolution as we continue to regulate the profession while working in solidarity with Nova Scotians to advocate for improvement to social policies and programs. We are excited for this new chapter.

The committee also supports a quarterly series of Communities of Practice events, which offer an opportunity for social workers to meet virtually over lunch and just talk. The idea behind this series is to create a safe space for social workers to connect amongst themselves and discuss issues of concern, share ideas and resources, brainstorm strategies for advocacy and be inspired and nourished by their colleagues.

Given that many social workers are not connected to other social workers on a daily basis in their work activities or environments, these gatherings hold space for our members to build professional relationships and develop a cohesive network that will also help us to be more effective in mobilizing for future advocacy needs.

The connections committee has sought to centre the voices, concerns and ideas of our members in its storytelling, and has restructured itself so that it can meet in alignment with these conversations. As the College prepares to embark upon its next strategic plan, the committee looks forward to reimagining how it will continue evolving in how it shares stories that inspire us to continue the incredible work that we do across our province. We invite you to join us in this adventure.

The committee has spent a significant amount of time reflecting upon the best ways to adapt to this change and to find new ways of telling our stories and sharing our values

Social Justice Committee

Social justice is a core value to the social work profession and at the heart of our code of ethics. It informs everything that we do and is the foundation of every committee and every decision. Nevertheless, this committee was created to provide opportunities for our members to address the larger structural context within which we work, that we may reduce the moral distress and ethical concerns of our members that our research has demonstrated to be significant obstacles in the delivery of safe(R) social work services across Nova Scotia.

This committee is grateful to the leadership of co-chairs Janet Pothier, RSW and Deb Philpitt, RSW, whose creative and visionary approach to leadership helped the committee transition to a new decentralized model of committee work in order to encourage new voices and perspectives. The committee expanded its numbers and undertook multiple projects, joining together with other committees to provide input and feedback into the next strategic plan of the College.

Multiple important conversations were held as members reflected on the unique challenges and opportunities of working to decolonize ourselves and our practice, advocating for social justice while continuing to work in systems that do not yet reflect our ethical mandate of antiracist and anti-discriminatory practice. These conversations have impacted the College in profound and transformational ways, as we seek to find ways of integrating our social justice values and ethics into everything that we do.

Central to this committee’s purpose is its commitment to advocating for the recommendations outlined in the College’s research and reports. We developed a Social Policy Framework in 2020 in partnership with the Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives’ NS office; the framework identifies guiding principles for social policy, and has since formed the foundation of the NSCSW’s social justice efforts. In 2021 we published a mental health paper with social work researchers at Dalhousie, Repositioning Social Work Practice in Mental Health in Nova Scotia, and a child welfare paper in 2023 with Wisdom 2 Action, Building an Ecosystem to Realize Children’s Rights and Support Family Well-Being in Nova Scotia

We are also guided by the recommendations of essential public inquiry reports such as the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action, Reclaiming Power and Place, Journey to Light, and Turning the Tide Together

Reflecting these commitments, the Social Justice Committee oversaw multiple projects to advance this vision and commitment. These included several Big Ideas in Mental Health panels, on issues such as the safety and well-being of 2SLGBTQIA+ children in Nova Scotia, to the lack of a coordinated approach to death and dying across the province to addressing the issue of weight bias in our health care system.

Creating opportunities for social workers to enter into dialogue with researchers and those with lived experiences ensures a broader understanding of the complex issues that impact the delivery of safe(R) social work services. This commitment to bringing together diverse voices and perspectives not only informs the creation of the Big Ideas in Mental Health panels, which were organized this year in collaboration with the Professional Development Committee but also the new Collaborative Care Professional Development Series which seeks to bring together multiple health care professions out of our shared commitment to decolonize health care more broadly.

The social work profession recognizes that every individual is affected by multiple overlapping systems and influences; addressing them effectively requires advocacy for multi-systemic intervention.

This knowledge is reflected in our code of ethics, which mandates a commitment to social justice, and in our professional development standards, which require every social worker in Nova Scotia to complete annual training or activities related to the pursuit of social justice.

The social justice committee has focused its efforts on ways to support our members in completing this requirement in creative and collaborative ways. Our annual Advocacy Day in March has been held in partnership with the Canadian Mental Health Association Nova Scotia Division (CMHA-NS), to advocate for increased funding for mental health, along with the other recommendations of the Repositioning report. The 2024 Advocacy Day built upon the success of the committee’s work in the summer of 2023, with its historic interprofessional letter advocating for the safety of 2SLGBTQIA+ children and updated educational guidelines. The committee was instrumental in envisioning the We Have Power advocacy toolkit developed in partnership with the Legal Information Society of Nova Scotia; this guide was launched at our March 2023 Advocacy Day, and expanded and improved during the year so that it could be further integrated into the 2024 event. This resource was designed to ensure Nova Scotians have robust tools to support them in advocating for the psychosocial, spiritual and structural determinants of their own well-being. The committee has also worked to develop guidelines for social workers to consider how to integrate advocacy into their practice.

Back in 2021, the Repositioning report identified that nearly all social workers providing mental health services experienced severe moral distress because the policies and practices where they work emphasized a biologicalmedical model of care that disregarded social, structural and ecological determinants of care. By providing social workers with tools that they can share with service users who identify structural factors that are affecting their mental health, the NSCSW seeks to empower both social workers and the communities they serve to join together to advocate for the healing conditions that will make safety and well-being possible.

Given the underlying structural factors that may influence a person’s decision to seek out medical assistance in dying (MAiD), the NSCSW has partnered together with the Nova Scotia Health Ethics Network (NSHEN) to begin to outline trends of requests and concerns related to this issue. The trends identified can help shape the order of priorities regarding advocacy related to the structural determinants of mental health and well-being, particularly as MAiD criteria may expand in the coming years to include people suffering solely from chronic mental illness.

All of these activities reflect the courageous and visionary leadership and thoughtful reflections and deliberations of our social justice committee members as they have sought to support the College in effective and ethically necessary advocacy alongside the communities we serve.

Professional Development Committee

This committee has worked to integrate its activities with the social justice and decolonizing committees to support the alignment of its work to promote safe(R) social work practice in Nova Scotia. This work has thrived under the dedicated and visionary leadership team of Catie Mace, RSW and Monica Boyd, SWC.

The preparation for each year’s conference begins the prior year. Thus in 2023 we delivered a virtual conference exploring The Ethics of Allyship that was well received by participants, and then began planning for 2024’s conference: Celebrating Courage. The committee has also begun to reflect on ways to update the NSCSW’s professional development policies to align with our profession’s new code of ethics.

A significant issue that emerged in consultation and through the feedback from our last few conferences has been how to address the issue of unconscious bias in the practice of social work. Members have shared incidents of lateral violence, workplace discrimination and other challenges that have highlighted this issue. This also reflects the urgent priority of working to ensure antiracist and anti-discriminatory social work practice that can advance our ethical mandate to shift from the illusion of neutrality to one that works to actively dismantle systemic bias, in order to foster social work praxis that reflects an anti-oppressive lens.

As a result, the committee has focused upon what it means to not only learn, but also begin to unlearn. We strive to unlearn our assumptions and unconscious bias, to cede our reliance upon colonial constructs that teach us that some voices or perspectives are more important than others, and to challenge the idea that professional development learning activities are separate from self-reflection, support for selfcare, or advocacy to make safer the structural/ community contexts we practice within.

The construction of the 2024 conference intentionally integrates all of these goals while embedding them in community and relationship. This reflects the NSCSW’s commitment to reclaiming the social work group method as part of its decolonizing our institution and our profession, and will help social workers in each region of the province develop collaborative relationships to support education and a dvocacy in the future.

The Committee has focused its efforts on planning a new type of conference that can celebrate courage and authenticity, foster community and connection, and help social workers decolonize themselves and their practice to ensure safer outcomes for themselves, for the people they work with, and for their communities.

The title of the 2024 conference reflects the courage that is needed to face our truths, speak our truths, and create truthful praxis. Our twopart theme also reflects a decolonizing shift to ensure safer social work practice by reducing burnout and dismantling unconscious or colonial bias.

YOU ARE NOT ALONE:

• The conference seeks to decolonize and help attendees unlearn the colonial myth of individuality which contributes to burnout and unsafe practice. Together, we can create the conditions to begin to heal ourselves and each other.

WE ARE ALL CONNECTED:

• An Indigenized approach to social work invites us to align social work practice in this region of unceded Mi’kma’ki with land-based Mi’kmaq values as part of our treaty responsibilities and our commitment to reconciliation. Msit No’kmaq means all my relations and refers to the traditional understanding that everything in the universe is interconnected. Everyone and everything has a purpose and is worthy of respect.

• An Africentric approach to social work can also invite us to align our praxis with Ubuntu principles and philosophy: I am because you are; I am because we are.

The Mi’kmaq word Mlkna literally means the state of having a fearless heart. By decentring our conference and learning to hear the voices that have been marginalized, erased or silenced (both externally in the world, and internally, due to the ways we have absorbed colonial violence through unconscious bias and through trauma), we seek to empower ourselves to step into a place of courage and authenticity that aligns with the Seven Grandfather Teachings: Nsituo’qn/Wisdom; Kesaltultimk/ Love; Kepmite’teken/Respect; Mlkna/Bravery; Koqaja’teken/Honesty; Wanqwajite’teken/ Humility; Tetpaqa’q/Truth.

Celebrating Courage seeks to create spaces for social workers to gather together and restore faith in themselves and the transformative potential of their practice. The conversations that will emerge during this conference will then guide the committee in how to best update the new NSCSW Professional Development Policy to better align with the College’s new Code of Ethics when it is published in 2024.

We hope to support practitioners in developing deep and nuanced understanding of how their positionality affects the work they do, and create opportunities to learn from those with lived experiences of intersectional marginalization and oppression. Our goal is to build community for our members and to help us learn from one another, even as we work to liberate ourselves. We will be celebrating the courageous voices of our members and learning from them, as we learn how to decolonize our practice, as part of our commitment to safer social work.

Professional Standards & Ethics Committee

Being a social worker is complex and often involves trying to sort through complex and confusing situations to help people navigate difficult and sometimes uncharted waters. Professional standards, guidelines and ethics consultations are important ways to provide guidance to our members. This committee seeks to ensure that regulatory concerns are integrated into our learning and resources to support our members and reduce risk.

The committee underwent a leadership change. The visionary leadership of Lauren Matheson, RSW helped the committee develop a new ethics consultation process in consultation with the Nova Scotia Health Ethics Network (NSHEN) and with the social justice committee. Matheson was succeeded by new co-chair Eva Burill, RSW who has joined Erin McDonald, RSW in promoting safer social work practice.

Frequently, when members seek ethics consultation, their concerns arise from the larger systemic and structural influences affecting the services that they can provide. Sometimes, social workers are unable to access the services or resources that they know are needed, because social conditions in our province have manufactured scarcity. In such cases, members are encouraged to join the NSCSW’s social justice committee or other community organizations working to advocate for the resources needed to ensure safer social work outcomes for those they serve.

Sometimes, social workers struggle to determine how to provide safe social work practices because of a lack of clarity in their organization or a difference of interpretation in ethical practices between themselves and their colleagues. In such situations, NSHEN can serve as a valuable resource to ensure that health care providers of varied disciplines, including social work, but also including medicine, psychology, clinical spiritual care, occupational therapy and others, can join together with ethicists to ensure safer outcomes for the patients and service users that they provide.

The NSCSW is especially grateful to Dr. Marika Warren at NSHEN, for her commitment to collaborating with us on several projects, including our quarterly Ethics Café series which seeks to provide opportunities for practitioners to gather and discuss various issues of ethical concern. This past year, these have especially focused on issues related to the potential expansion of medical assistance in dying to individuals with mental health challenges. Our panel discussions have sought to align education with advocacy, as we have also partnered with the Canadian Mental Health Association – Nova Scotia Division, in our advocacy for universal mental health as part of our annual Advocacy Day.

In addition to working to address ethical concerns and to provide input on the adaptation of the new CASW Code of Ethics to the Nova Scotian context, this committee has focused on developing practice resources for social workers. In 2023 they developed and published documentation guidelines to ensure traumainformed and consistent approaches to recordings. They are continuing to work on guidelines related to assessing child well-being in order to align with new divorce legislation; this project has required a significant amount of consultation and deliberation in order to ensure that these guidelines align with an antioppressive lens.

The professional standards and ethics committee looks forward to continuing its efforts in this arena and to the input of its members over the coming year in order to make safer outcomes possible for everyone receiving social work services in Nova Scotia.

We are grateful to all of our members who dedicate their time and share their wisdom and expertise to support the important work of this committee as we seek to create practice guidelines that integrate social work research, social work values, and the diverse experiences of first voice advocates and practitioners themselves.

Decolonizing & Indigenizing Social Work Committee

This committee’s co-chairs are Michelle Peters, RSW, PP, and Crystal Hill, RSW, come together with other Indigenous social workers — Mi’kmaw, First Nations and Inuit — and community leaders to reflect upon how to support and guide the NSCSW and its members in the necessary labour of reconciliation

Our profession has a unique responsibility to understand what was done and do what we can to work toward decolonization.

In its statement of apology and commitment to reconciliation, the Canadian Association of Social Workers (CASW) acknowledged its role in supporting the implementation of residential schools, and in affirming the approach to child welfare that led to the 60s scoop through the promotion of discriminatory policies. The underlying motivation in the development of these policies was to dispossess Indigenous peoples from their land.

The CASW has apologized for contributing to the injustices imposed on Indigenous peoples and, in this statement, seeks to highlight some of the ways in which CASW was – and in many ways still is – implicated in the systemic denial and inequality that has been apparent in the field of social work. As such, it has begun to reach out to Indigenous communities across Canada, to partner with them in beginning the work of decolonization and reconciliation.

NSCSW joined with the CASW in this apology and has affirmed its commitment to do the necessary work in the Truth and Reconciliation Commission’s calls to action and the calls to justice clearly identified by the National Inquiry into Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women and Girls (MMIWG).

In particular, the NSCSW acknowledges our role in the violent colonization of Indigenous communities through the ways in which social workers have worked on behalf of colonial systems to implement policies that have contributed to the destruction of Indigenous communities and perpetuated the racist ideology implicit in those actions.

This recognition is done within a larger context where the NSCSW joins the CASW in re-examining our historical and continued role in colonization of indigenous people and lands as part of our commitment to decolonize social work. We also continue working to address the multiple intersectional forms of racism, heteronormativity, prejudice and oppression that have accompanied the dominant lens of the colonizer and embedded themselves in policy and practice.

Specifically, the NSCSW council, committee and staff are committed to undertaking this journey toward decolonization. As stated in the CASW apology: acknowledging the truth is hard, but the work of reconciliation is harder. This work requires that the paternalistic and racist foundations of our policies be rejected, and that new policies and guidelines be developed in partnership with Indigenous communities.

This past year, this restructured itself to continue to explore the ways in can best reflect the diversity of Indigenous voices and perspectives that must guide this work, while also considering the importance of ensuring the indigenization of the social work profession in unceded Mi’kma’ki. The Committee provided valuable insight and consultation in the College’s development of the new clinical guidelines and the new CASW Code of Ethics.

This committee’s recommendations and input also led to the NSCSW entering into dialogue with the leadership of the Maw-Kleyu’kik Knijannaq (MKK) Child Welfare Initiative, which is working on a project to exercise complete jurisdiction and governance over child welfare and to establish a Mi’kmaw child and family services body governed by Mi’kmaw law and policy.

We are committed to doing everything that we can to continue to learn and unlearn, in our quest to ensure safer social work practice in Nova Scotia, and are grateful for this committee’s guidance and wisdom in doing so.

2023 Committee Members & Community Consultants

We are grateful for the participation and consultation of the following individuals who either served on one of our committees, or joined some of these meetings to provide consultation and share their expertise or unique point of view.

• Serena Ali

• Nelda Armour

• Moseline Atangana

• Gail Baikie

• Sandra Pickrell Baker

• Jacklyn Barclay

• Kristen Basque

• Jey Benoit

• Kelsey Benoit

• Craig Besaw

• Haley Boone

• Debra Bourque

• Monica Boyd

• Dominic Boyd

• Veronique Brideau

• Suzanne Brooks

• Robyn Buote

• Debra Burke

• Eva Burrill

• Jodi Butler

• Gary Carey

• Brooke Collicutt

• Joline Comeau

• Mary Cripton

• Emily Crosby

• Lisa Dauphinee

• Kevin Delahunty

• Shane Esarik

• Sophie Gallant

• Trusha Gordon

• Raquel Griffin

• Mobina Hasan

• Deb Hickling

• Crystal Hill

• Kelly Hunt

• Holly Johnson

• Louise Jones

• Haley Keeping

• Niveditha Krishnan

• Danielle Laurie

• Stephanie LeBlanc

• Melissa LeBlanc

• Polly Leonard

• Terrence Lewis

• Héloïse Lhorte

• Tamsyn Loat

• Josey Lovett

• Helen Luedee-Boone

• Lynn Mac Donald

• Brennagh MacDonald

• Catie Mace

• Lana Maclean

• Jessica MacLean

• Heather MacNeill

• Lauren Matheson

• Sheri McConnell

• Erin McDonald

• Laurette McGaughey

• Tanya McHarg

• Holly Meuse

• Dermot Monaghan

• Ax Montasser

• Colin Morrison

• Jim Morton

• April Munro-Wood

• Meaghan Norris

• Olivia O’Shea

• Juanita Paris

• Elder Ella Paul

• Rohith Perike

• Michelle Peters

• Deb Philpitt

• Philippa Pictou

• Amy Pinnell

• Anne Pirie

• Shane Pope

• Janet Pothier

• Josh Purdy

• Ellen Reid

• Laara Richardson

• Mario Rolle

• Rene Schofield

• Diane Scott

• Dawn Sherry

• Dani Sherwood

• Rachel Smith

• Heather Smith

• Mario Spiler

• Patricia Stephens-Brown

• Curtis Stevens

• Shataya Stevenson

• Hannah Stewart

• Maggie Stewart

• Michelle Stonehouse

• Joanne Sulman

• Ann Sylliboy

• Joanna Thompson

• Jubanti Toppo

• Jason Tucker

• Jennifer van Kessel

• Emelia Visca

• Chloe Walls

• Tara Webb

• Marie Sharon Westhaver

• Robert Wright

• Dr. Suzanne Zinck

• Wilson Zvomuy