Social Work Forum focuses on First Nations children
The 17th annual Social Work Forum, hosted by the Social Work Professional Development Partnership (PDP), took place at the Coast Hotel on Wednesday.
About 180 social workers, students and others filled the conference room for the forum. This year’s theme was “Kimmapiiyipitssin Compassion and Action: Social Work with First Nations Children Today and for the Future.”
PDP co-chair Tanie Reid-Walker said it’s important for them to host a forum in Lethbridge, so those in southern Alberta don’t have to travel too far to get professional development. She added social workers are required to reach a certain number of credits to reapply and this forum offers six hours of ACSW Continuing Competency Category A credits.
“We’re so busy, we don’t have time to take away from our clients and the people we care about and serve to go running off for a week somewhere.”
Typically, the themes have focused on First Nations issues and an emphasis was placed on children this year.
“There’s an overrepresentation of children in care from the First Nations community and we need to work at helping children being supported and communities being supported and less division,” said Reid-Walker.
Charlene Bearhead, education lead for the National Centre for Truth and Reconciliation at the University of Manitoba, was the facilitator and main speaker for the event who discussed a number of issues such as inequality, trauma and its impact.
“We’re here talking about building relationships between Indigenous and non-Indigenous community members, but also service providers, to find better ways to do this work and we can’t do that if we don’t know the collective history,” said Bearhead.
Which is why she began the day with history around residential schools and acknowledged the difficult truths surrounding our history with residential schools and child welfare.
She said a lack of understanding can lead to inefficient ways of supporting families and children and it’s important for everyone to come together in forums like this.
“We’re coming together to talk about how in the practice of social work and also the practices of health ... how do we come together in the best way possible to find ways to serve families and children in ways that are really grounded and rooted in the knowledge of their home First Nations communities.”
Bearhead ended the event by looking at the path moving forward and helping to generate discussion on what actions and strategies are needed to help lead to equality, change and hope for First Nations children and youth.
“We need to get over ourselves and our organizations and look at focusing on the children and the families and to be able to humble ourselves and understand that maybe the way we’ve been doing things isn’t the best way possible because if it was, we wouldn’t be having the numbers of children taking their lives,” said Bearhead. “They are young people feeling like their lives aren’t worth living, so we really need to be able to hear; we need to be able to hear the children; we need to be able to hear the families; we need to be open to what it is that is needed so that our young people are able to recognize that they are important and they have stories worth telling and lives worth living.”
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