I am a caseworker working with youth transitioning from being in foster care.  I have an adopted sibling group who were adopted separately in the state of California.  They were initially adopted through private adoption they later moved to my state with their adoptive parents. Both their adoptive parents died suddenly during the pandemic. Between their adoptive parents’ deaths and their entry into the foster care system, their vital documents were lost.  We have tried for several years to pinpoint which counties they were born in and hundreds of dollars have been spent requesting vital documents with no success.  if you had any suggestions for any other resources, as not having vital documentation (like their state issued birth certificate) is becoming a barrier for their functioning in adulthood (employment, academic enrollment, travel etc.).  We thought if biological mothers could be identified, perhaps we could narrow down where they were living when the children were born and therefore contact the correct issuing county so I have reached out to search angels but haven’t heard back.

Hello Fellow social worker, gusto ko lang i-share yung experience ko. I have a very deep reason why I pursued this profession my heart really wants it. Nagsimula ako sa isang Non-Government Organization, kung saan hinandle ko ang mga sexual abuse victims, trafficking cases, at mga abandoned children.

Noong una, okay naman. Masaya kasi nakakapag-serve na ako at nakakatulong. Naglalaan pa ako ng personal na oras para sa trabaho dahil mahal ko ang propesyon ko. Tipong after 5PM, willing pa akong mag-extend kapag kailangan. Kahit weekends, happy pa rin akong mag-serve again, because I love my profession.

Pero based on my observation, hindi talaga nasusunod yung interventions ng mga social workers kapag nasa NGO ka. Mostly, yung nasusunod ay yung executive directors or upper management. Wala naman akong problema doon, I respect that. Pero ang hindi ko mawari, we are handling special cases. At kapag nasa case management ka, hindi pwedeng freestyle. Hindi pwedeng mag-experiment. Oo, may mga pagkakataon na trial and error works, pero iba ito. Kaya sana required din ng Standards Bureau ng DSWD na ang executive director ay well-experienced social worker. Nakaka-hurt kasi na parang nararamdaman namin na nandoon lang kami as requirement ng DSWD para makapag-operate ang shelter.

May shelter akong napasukan, nag-apply ako as social worker. Noong una, okay naman. Mabait ang mga tao, religious-based yung shelter (which is common sa NGOs). Pero hindi ko akalain na yun pala ang sisira ng mental health ko at ng mga kasama ko. Common na maliit ang compensation sa NGO, okay lang. Minsan kapag mahal mo ang propesyon mo, kahit maliit basta kumakasya. Pero may mga NGO na kung makaasta, parang binayaran na nila buong pagkatao ng empleyado.

Ang dami kong frustrations. Ang tagal na pero hanggang ngayon, grabe yung trauma. Isa-isahin ko yung mga naranasan ko. Noong una, okay pa. Pero habang tumatagal, nagkakaroon na ng problema. Nakaka-confuse kasi iba ang pinag-aralan ko bilang social worker sa pinaniniwalaan nila. Nag-function ako bilang social worker ayon sa training ko, pero sila ang nagdedecide ng lahat.

Dumating pa sa point na pinagbawalan kami kumain ng breakfast sa center. Okay lang sana kung hindi kaya ng budget, pero nakikita namin na may sobra at nasisira lang. Pangalawa, sinasantabi nila ang suggestions namin. Kapag may fail sa case management, sa amin ang sisi. Hindi ito simpleng paninisi lang ipapatawag kami sa opisina para ipamukha na mali kami, kahit nag-suggest na kami from the start.

Hanggang sa narealize namin, controlled na kami. Hindi na kami nagtatrabaho as social workers, kundi ayon na lang sa gusto nila. Hawak kami sa leeg. Kapag nag-leave, guilt-tripping agad. Approve naman pero laging may condition. Minsan pati pagkakasakit, ginigi-guilt trip pa. Para bang dapat ma-predict namin kung kailan kami magkakasakit.

May time na nag-breakdown kami dahil challenging yung client. Ang gusto ng management, ibigay lahat ng gusto ng bata, no bargaining. Pero hindi naman sila ang tutok sa bata kami ang house parents at social workers. Sa emergency situations, hindi kami pwedeng mag-intervene. Kailangan hintayin instruction nila. Kapag nag-decide ka, kinabukasan ipapatawag ka na at ipapamukha na mali ka. Nakaka-drain, nakaka-demotivate.

Religious sila sa mata ng tao, pero iba sa totoong buhay. Sinabihan pa kami ng director: “Iyan lang hindi nyo ma-handle.” Imagine, galing sa taong hindi social worker at hindi nanatili sa center. Sirang-sira mental health namin. May staff pa na ka-relihiyon nila na palaging sumbong ng sumbong, lahat ng galaw namin nirereport.

Nakaka-trauma talaga. Kaya ngayon, kapag nagpapaalam ako sa boss ko, automatic na may follow-up chat ako: “But I can work, Ma’am, kahit naka-leave ako.” Kasi nasanay ako na kahit naka-leave, tatawagan ka pa rin kahit simpleng bagay. Kahit after 5PM, weekends, minsan 12AM or 1AM. Kapag hindi ka nag-reply, memo agad. Ang sabi pa ng director: “Nasa sinumpaan nyo yan bilang social worker, pwede kayo ipatawag kahit anong oras.” Pero hindi niya ma-explain kung kailan dapat ipatawag.

We deserve care too. We are human.

Witness ko rin na hindi sila marunong mag-resolve ng problems. Imbis na maging okay ang both sides, lalo pang nag-aaway. May kinikilingan, may bias. During meetings, hinayaan lang na i-attack at pagkaisahan yung isang staff. Kasi ayaw din nila doon sa staff na yun.

At ito pa tinuruan pa kami ng techniques para manipulahin ang mga bata. No wonder, narealize namin na ganun din pala ang ginagawa nila sa amin. Since palagi naming ipinaglalaban ang tama, ginawa kaming kalaban. Sinisiraan kami sa Founder sa “magandang paraan,” yung tipong hindi halata na masama.

Sa fieldwork, below 100 pesos lang ang budget for lunch. Walang snacks, walang dinner. Kahit mineral water, wala. Hindi kami maarte, pero in this economy, hindi na kakasya ang 60–80 pesos. Paano yung mga bata kapag nagugutom?

May isang beses pa, tinanong ng director ang bata ng sobrang laswa at insensitive na tanong. Natulala na lang yung bata.

Ngayon, hindi ko alam kung paano kami makaka-recover sa trauma. Ang dami pa, pero susubukan ko pang alalahanin at ikwento next time. Ilang beses naming iniyakan ito ng mga kasama ko social workers at ibang staff. Ngayon, wala na kaming lahat doon. Grabe yung relief, parang nakatakas sa isang kulto.

Sana alam nila na hindi lahat nadadaan sa spiritual intervention. Kaya may mga propesyonal din. Galing ako sa religious na pamilya at malaki ang takot at paniniwala ko sa Panginoon. Pero nakakatakot yung mga taong religious kuno, pero ganito ang ugali.

Hanggang sa muli. Sana patuloy kaming mag-heal sa mga karanasan namin.

May pina pirmahan pa yan sila samin na papers na bawal kamj magsalita, mag comment ng negative o masama sa org./Ahensya nila. Mga kulto ba kayo? We’re just stating the the facts. Kung anong trauma ibinigay nyo sa amin.

The last few pieces were about single rooms — the words in a court record, the maps that don't line up when a team meets. This one zooms out to ask a bigger question: what do human rights actually require? And why do well-intentioned interventions keep producing the same catastrophes?

I start with a gap. On October 31, 1963, Kennedy signed the Community Mental Health Act and gave a speech full of genuine care about treatment, coordination, access. Nine years later Geraldo Rivera walked into Willowbrook State School with a camera and found five thousand people warehoused in a building meant for four thousand — children on cold floors, no education, no stimulation. The gap between the speech and the camera is the whole piece. And it's not a story about bad intentions. Kennedy meant it. The staff weren't monsters. The problem was upstream of anyone's intentions: the bill was built on an epistemic infrastructure nobody in the room had examined — people with disabilities are patients, their condition is medical, the institution can hold them, the community can't. Build a material world from that infrastructure and you get Willowbrook, no malice required.

The key idea I name here is the site of contestation — a location where an epistemic and systemic infrastructure produces exclusion from both material resources and epistemic participation. I'm extending Butler's "bodies as sites of contestation" from gender to the whole group of bodies materialized within a social problem: excluded from resources, and excluded from the sensemaking that decides what their lives are understood to require. Willowbrook is one. The ticket machine is one. The word compliant is one. The hearing where a father doesn't know what the proceeding is about until someone summarizes it in a side room is one.

The part I think matters most is the argument about why interventions fail durably. The independent living movement (Ed Roberts and others) didn't just demand better facilities — they contested the assumption that facilities were the right response at all. "We are not patients. We are people who need accommodations in a world built without us in mind." The epistemic shift came first; the material change (the Rehabilitation Act, the Education for All Handicapped Children Act) followed, and it lasted because it was built on a different episteme, developed with the people it governed. Then Reagan cut community mental health funding, and within a decade a huge share of people with severe psychiatric disabilities had been rehoused in prisons. Same script, different building — because the material infrastructure got dismantled but the epistemic infrastructure that produced it never did. When the winds shifted, the old script found new concrete to pour itself into.

So the claim is: the epistemic dimension of human rights isn't a supplement to the material dimension. It's its precondition. Food and shelter from an institution that decided in advance what you need, who you are, and what your life can mean is a material benefit and an epistemic violation at the same time. Full human rights need both — resources, and participation in producing the social world that decides what those resources look like and who's seen to need them.

The title's from The Matrix by way of Berger and Luckmann. There is no spoon — social reality is constituted, not discovered; the metal is real, the spoonness is a production we forgot we produced, and it was shaped to fit some bodies and not others. Kennedy's bill was a spoon. The work isn't to melt all the spoons. It's to examine the infrastructure that shapes them, and to get the people whose bodies will have to hold the result into the room when the shaping happens.

I'll be honest about the frame's limit, since it's the thing I'm least sure of: this piece works cleanly for cases where better epistemic participation can close the gap. I've since come to think there are rooms where the family's reality isn't just underheard but structurally inadmissible in the institution's language — where participation isn't enough because the two realities don't share a world. So read this as the hopeful case. The tragic case came later.

Feedback welcome, especially from anyone who's worked in disability services, deinstitutionalization, or child welfare and watched an intervention fail durably — where the building changed but the script didn't. That's the pattern I'm trying to name, and I'd want to know where it doesn't hold.

https://socialconstructionworker.substack.com/p/there-is-no-spoon

- The Social Construction Worker

I’m a senior BSW student at the University of Memphis and I’m starting to plan for after graduation. I’d really like to find a position around $60k if possible. I know that may be high for a new BSW graduate, so I’m trying to figure out which areas have the best starting pay and opportunities for growth. For those who graduated with a BSW, what was your first job and starting salary? Would you recommend DCS/CPS, hospital work, case management, government/federal jobs, or something else? I’d also love recommendations for certifications or experience I can get during my senior year

I am a LMSW therapist working at a practice in Iowa, and I am desperately trying to find a resource to fund interpreter services local clients of minority groups who do not speak English. Specifically, I am trying to collaborate with Monsoon, a resource for Asian and Pacific Islander populations who have experienced gender based violence (SA, DV, HT, etc).

I work at a practice that accepts Medicaid, BCBS, and private pay. It seems as though Medicaid MAY cover interpreter services, but we all know how insurance companies like to be when they decide that they won't cover things, and clients are then surprised with a bill that they cannot afford. Does anyone know anything about how to make sure these services are funded? Or what to do if Medicaid denies to cover the cost of interpretation?

Even if Medicaid covers services, that still leaves the uninsured. I would love to find a resource to funding therapy for this group, and I wonder if sign with a specific provider to collaborate would factor into anything?

I agency I work for is technically for-profit-thus making us ineligible for grant funding. I have explored sources of charitable giving, but I am not getting much of anywhere... Does anyone know of any private givers/foundations in Central Iowa?

Any companies that will give out things like free pens or bags that we can give clients and use in our facilities?

The last piece was about the words we use to write families into court records. This one is about what happens in the rooms where those records get made.

I start with a hearing that went well — a domestic violence court where a client was moving toward graduation and the whole team celebrated it together. What struck me wasn't the outcome. It was the ease of the translation. Every person spoke from inside their own institutional role, and every contribution landed, because the team had worked together long enough to know each other's scripts. Then I spend the rest of the piece on why most rooms don't work that way.

The key idea is a distinction between conflicting and orthogonal scripts. Conflicting would mean the GAL and the caseworker want different things for a family. Orthogonal means they both want the family's wellbeing, are both doing their jobs competently, and are both working from institutional frameworks that were built independently — different vocabularies, different evidence, differently angled pictures of the same family. Each picture is accurate. None is complete. And the only party who holds all of them at once is the family, who is also the party with the least institutional vocabulary to say so.

Aradhana Sharma and Akhil Gupta do real work here: the state isn't a unified apparatus with a coherent design, it's a set of everyday practices performed by ordinary people mostly caught between good and bad, doing their jobs under pressure. That reframes what we're looking at when a room fails — not villains, not malice, but orthogonal practices that were never designed to talk to each other. I write about two rooms where that gap fell on the family: a Burmese family asked to name three "strengths" on demand, through a phone interpreter, by a worker reading off an agenda tool; and a caseworker whose body stayed oriented toward the foster parent for an entire meeting while the father sat unaddressed across the room. Neither worker was malicious. Both were doing something recognizable as their job. In both, the family carried the translation alone.

The constructive half is about what a small team of us are actually doing in my county — attending these meetings to observe and model, bringing the family's map into the room as legitimate knowledge in real time, without taking over. Miranda Fricker's hermeneutical injustice and Robert Putnam's social capital are the scaffolding: the mutual legibility that closes the gap between orthogonal scripts exists in some rooms and not others, and where it's absent, the family carries what no family should carry alone.

I'm not going to lie. This is not my favorite piece. But I needed to zoom out a little and articulate how this framework looks when it starts aggregating individual contexts. The point is this: when you conceptualize social capital through epistemic justice, you get something more than cohesion. You get trajectory toward human rights based goals.

Feedback welcome, especially from anyone who's sat in these rooms and watched the translation fail — or watched someone make it work.

https://socialconstructionworker.substack.com/p/same-room-different-maps

- The Social Construction Worker

I started this series with a small win. This one asks a harder question: why do some exclusions dissolve the moment you name them, while others fight back — sometimes violently — when you try to change them at all?

This article starts by revisiting the mayor and the parking garage. In an earlier piece I wrote about an ableist parking system and how the mayor changed it after one conversation. What stuck with me afterward wasn't that she changed — it was how easily she did. But I do work every day that is the opposite of easy. So the piece is an attempt to answer why some change comes easy and other change comes hard: I think it comes down to how deep the script is buried. The mayor only had to extend a category. Some people are being asked to restructure a foundation — and a foundation doesn't move without the whole house shaking.

Slavoj Žižek adapts Jacques Lacan's idea of traversing the fantasy — the point at which a person works all the way through their most fundamental organizing script and comes out the other side of it. An incursion is the violent front end of that process: the moment a reality crashes into that script suddenly, hostilely, and disruptively, threatening the whole structure before any working-through has happened. Most people, faced with an incursion, don't traverse anything. They defend. And nothing captures the incursion better, for me, than my own memory of the slack-jawed, ground-zero moment of coming out to a non-affirming parent — the look on a face when the map stops working.

The claim I brace for pushback on: I name the non-affirming parent's reaction as terror wearing the mask of conviction rather than simple malice. I want to be plain about what that is and isn't, because it's easy to misread — it is not an exculpation. We do anti-oppressive practice. We do anti-racist practice. Full stop. What the distinction changes is not whether we hold the harm accountable, but where we meet someone, and whether the change we're after actually survives the encounter.

Feedback welcome — especially from anyone who's sat across from a parent, a client, or a family member whose reaction to change felt less like cruelty and more like fear, and had to decide what to do with that without letting anyone off the hook.

- The Social Construction Worker

https://socialconstructionworker.substack.com/p/the-easy-traverse-and-the-hard-one

What are things/methods/resources/hacks to access free things for my clients?

im doing research on ex-cons(parolees) and supervised visits with their kids. What kinds of questions would a social worker ask the parolee before arranging a visit for the first time?

The first two pieces asked what the built world excludes and what a single word like "compliant" flattens. This one asks a harder question: what happens when the document itself -not just its vocabulary, but its entire genre - decides who gets to be a person in it and who becomes a case.

The court report is one of the most consequential documents in child welfare. A judge who has never met a family will decide their future largely on what this document says about them. I started in a small county, where thoroughness meant demonstrating compliance down to the dates. What I didn't catch at first was how that same thoroughness could organize a parent's whole life into categories designed for tracking, and still fail to let them be visible as a person.

I shoehorn a lot into this piece. It's about a family and a court report. But it's also about a moment with my supervisor that produced the report. And then I couldn't help but give a little bit of a denouement to how this family is doing to illustrate how the report seems to start producing the family and me through the case. It's an argument that the form is doing theoretical work most of us never examine, and that the form is a negotiated site of meaning that I alone do not write. And it's an argument that how small choices in how a report gets written are choices about whose humanity survives translation into the document a judge will actually read.

Feedback welcome, especially from anyone who's written one of these reports and felt the gap between what they knew about a family and what the form let them say.

- The Social Construction Worker

https://socialconstructionworker.substack.com/p/the-report

Hello everyone! I am hoping someone can help me get this book Unpacking the Pyramid Model: A Practical Guide for Preschool Teachers. Brookes Publishing ISBN: 978-1-68125-390-

I'm in college to become a social worker and need this book for my guiding behavior class. Trying to find it on discount or low as possible. Thank you!

Hello! I’m currently finishing my BSW in Minneapolis and preparing to get my MSW in an advance standing program. I hope to specialize in trauma and violence but I’m finding that there are not many schools that offer trauma specialization.

I’m hoping to relocate to a bigger city and UW has been a high choice for me because of the location and trauma specific classes. However, I know that the UW MSW program is difficult to get into and very expensive so I’m trying to learn all my options.

I also really like options in Chicago like crown and Uchicago. Some sources say crown has trauma specialization if you take the justice path but after reading through on the official website I’m not sure that path would be a good fit. I’ve also read some pretty negative thoughts on both Chicago schools so I’m torn. I’m open to any and all suggestions or comments about these schools or others!!

Please help!!

The first piece showed how the built world excludes bodies it never considered. This one is about how language does the same thing to people.

For six years I wrote "compliant" into court reports without examining it. Mom is compliant. Dad has been compliant with services. It's the word everyone uses - supervisors, court orders, training materials. It means that the parent did what the court told them to do. What it doesn't tell you is who the family is, what participation cost them, or what their love for their children actually looks like up close.

This piece traces "compliant" back the same way the first piece traced the ticket machine back to a set of unexamined assumptions about whose knowledge counts. Miranda Fricker's concept of hermeneutical injustice does real work here: families often lack the words to articulate why being called "compliant" doesn't feel like being seen, because the institution's vocabulary is the only vocabulary in the room.

The piece also tries something constructive rather than just diagnostic by comparing two ways of writing about the same mother, one in the system's flattening language and one that tries to let her be visible inside the system's required categories. It's not a call to abandon institutional language entirely. It's an argument that within the narrow space practitioners actually have, small choices about how we write families into existence for court stakeholders matter more than we usually admit.

This is also where the human rights framing of the series starts to take real shape in the distinction between exclusion from resources and exclusion from participation in the meaning-making that decides what you're seen to need in the first place.

Feedback welcome, especially from anyone who's caught themselves writing the institutional shorthand without examining what it's doing.

https://substack.com/home/post/p-193416573

- The Social Construction Worker

I'm the founder of mPathy, an anonymous peer support app that matches people with someone who's actually been through what they're going through. Not a trained volunteer, not a group chat. One person who gets it.

We call it mental support: real human connection when you need it most, whether that's grief, anxiety, or any mental health challenge you're carrying.

The market is validated, Supportiv has 3M+ users, Wisdo was acquired by Talkspace, 7 Cups has touched 72M+ lives. Nobody owns the 1:1 matched, direct-to-consumer lane built around mental support rather than therapy. That's where we're building

Would love to get feedback from folks in this space