Social Work Values

The values of the social work profession has the following six core values; service, social justice, dignity and worth of the person, importance of human relationships, integrity, and competence. It is my belief that because so many of these values align with my personal beliefs this profession is a perfect fit for me. While all of theses values I resonate with, the three that are of the utmost importance are social justice, dignity and worth of a person, and social justice. These values mean the most to me because I believe theses are the location in our practice that we can show our humanity. My own value along with the profession values of the social worker industry has highly affected my practice as a social worker. Being someone who
The example that’s most salient was at my last place of employment, this was an organization that’s been around for twenty years, and was at that time rewarded a grant to start a new program. I was hired to help build this new program. I had three years of experience working in this particular grant. My new supervisor was a white man with no prior experience in this field. So early on in our relationship, I felt he was threatened by my experience in the field. Often times he and I would get into disputes about ethical dilemmas. For example, as apart of the SSVF program participants are allowed up to 1500 dollars in emergency funds to buy things like furniture and food, which he was responsible for handling. Well there was this one particular incident when I had a homeless pregnant woman on my caseload. I helped her find permanent housing but she had no food or furniture. I put the necessary paper work to him requesting the items that client needed (which included things like a crib for her unborn child) and which took him three weeks to approve the items and then another two weeks for him to put the purchase order in. Often times he was never able to give me a clear reason as to why there was a delay in purchasing the items. When things like this happened, it often made me feel like he was acting from a place of privilege. Which exasperated the feeling that it was my obligation to advocate for theses client. In turn these interaction, I believe made him feel like I was questioning his authority. Because of this I was called into a meeting with HR and was told that I was creating a hostile work environment. No one in HR ever had a discussion with me about my side of the story they just took his word for everything, which later caused my resignation from this organization. I felt that my values regarding how clinicians should be treated clients didn’t align with