Every day for more than a century, social
workers have been on the front lines finding
innovative ways to address our nation's toughest
social problems. In 2016, the American Academy
of Social Work & Social Welfare launched the
Grand Challenges for Social Work to harness the
ingenuity, expertise, dedication, and creativity
of individuals and organizations within the field
of social work and beyond to champion social
progress powered by science.
This ambitious effort actually began several
years earlier, with the creation of a strong,
evidence-based foundation for the initiative.
A founding Executive Committee - which
included some of the nation's leading scientists,
educators, and policy experts - reached out
across the profession and developed strategic
partnerships with social work's national
organizations, interest groups, and academic
entities. The committee then issued a broad
call for ideas for large-scale challenges to tackle
and ultimately distilled a list of more than
80 submitted concepts down to the 12 Grand
Challenges for Social Work. Their criteria:
that a Grand Challenge must be important,
compelling to the broader public, and have a
science base connected to interventions that
could lead to meaningful and measurable
change. These were announced at the 2016
annual Society for Social Work and Research
(SSWR) conference - "Grand Challenges
for Social Work: Setting a Research Agenda
for the Future" - in Washington, DC. Multidisciplinary networks were formed to support
work on each of the Grand Challenges.
In 2020, as the nation and the world's attention
focused on racial injustice and ending systemic
violence against and oppression of Black
people and people of color, an additional
Grand Challenge was announced: the Grand
Challenge to Eliminate Racism. Although
the initiative had understood racism as
inextricably linked to each of the first 12 Grand
Challenges, the establishment of the Grand
Challenge to Eliminate Racism brought greater
attention to promoting culturally-grounded,
upstream interventions and prevention efforts
designed to eradicate racist policies, bias, and
discriminatory practices.
GRAND CHALLENGES FOR SOCIAL WORK:
FIVE YEARS OF PROGRESS
An Impact Report at Year 5 of the 10-Year Initiative | 1