Show Notes

If you are an Alberta social worker, you may or may not have already heard of our new-ish Social Work Association called SWAA.

In today’s episode, I have the pleasure of sitting down with Krista Osborne, SWAA Vice President and registered clinical social worker to discuss what SWAA is and what they’ve been up to since the organization began in Alberta four years ago.

Hi Krista, welcome to the show. I’m so glad to have you here today.

Hi Kayla, I’m excited to be here.

Krista, before we dive into today’s episode, please introduce yourself, where you’re from, and tell us a little bit about you and your position at SWAA.

All right. That is a long-winded question for a short-winded question for a long-winded answer, I guess is a better way of putting it.

My name is Krista Osborne. Like many clinical social workers. I have lots of hats, and so I work as an assistant professor at the University of Calgary in their faculty of social work. So I teach there, I teach BSW students as well as master’s level students. And there I am the trauma lead for their trauma-informed practice specialization for the MSW, which is one of my hats.

I also have a small private practice that I’ve had. Oh, I think it’s 13 years now. And yeah, in St. Albert, Alberta. And so that is lovely. I really think that the best teachers are also practitioners and the best practitioners are often also teachers. And so I really think that both those roles inform my practice a bunch.

But as a clinical social worker, I also feel that draw towards that social justice mandate of our profession. And so I also feel very much connected to doing work on behalf of the profession as well. And so that’s why I’m here today is to talk about that hat. I am the Vice President of the Social Work Association of Alberta, and I’ve been there for three and a bit years now.

And really am here to talk about that particular part of my professional identity which is pretty awesome.

Oh I’m so glad that you’re here today. But for any listener who may not know what SWAA is, what is it?  

There is a short answer and a long answer for sure. The Social Work Association of Alberta is, like you said, a new-ish organization. It’s been around since, the divestment of the Alberta Association of Social Workers. And the Social Work Association had to actually split roles at one point in time under the Alberta Health Professions Act. So we ended up having to divest from each other because the Alberta College of Social Workers used to be both an association and a regulatory body. And so now those two things have been separated by legislation.

And so as a part of that process, we had to create the Social Work Association of Alberta. And that took a bit of time. And so in 2023 really is where we’d like to say that the association started to really exist in its current form and which is lovely. And then I was happy to be a part of the inaugural board that started in September of 2023. And so that is what happened there.

So what is SWAA? You can’t really talk about SWAA without. The recognition of the history because we are an organization that is really designed to be the Association of Social Workers. So this is where social workers come and support each other, where we do professional development activities, like we’re really involved in advocacy for the profession as well. And trying to get this collaborative approach to social work in Alberta so that we can start working towards change in some cases, advocacy in other cases, but really about how do we increase the profession’s ability to support each other and our profession but also our ability to support the people we work with in the province as well. And so we have a big mandate for a small organization. And so you can imagine we have lofty goals yet are still working on building that.

So really what the professional association is a bunch of social work members that have all come together with this collective belief that we are better together.

Absolutely. And if we think of associations for social work, typically, and I’m going to go through a regulatory versus an association breakdown. For those who are unaware, regulatory bodies, their mission is to protect the public, whereas the associations are the organizations that are there to support its members. So in this case, of course, social workers. And I know that at least here in Alberta, because they were one of the same at one time, now we’re trying to separate what that means into two different identities. So the association is there to support the social workers. Regulatory bodies are there to protect the public. Would that be an accurate reflection?

That’s the perfect reflection, Kayla, for sure. And the idea is that like the association is different and completely separate. So we do work with the ACSW in terms of helping support what it is that they’re trying to do on behalf of social workers as well.

But we are very separate and as you can imagine, because our mandates one’s regulatory and one’s more professional. There is some tension sometimes. And that actually is by design, right? So that we can each have our individual functions and keep them separate so that it can be really clear to the public about who to go to when they’re having regulatory issues or want to make complaints.

So the person who is supporting is not also the person who is creating boundaries or consequences if there’s in fact wrongdoing happening. And so that we can separate those things so that they’re not confusing and difficult.

Of course, Kayla, to your point that you were alluding to, that is very confusing for social workers right now. And that’s part of the reason why I am on this podcast because we get phone calls every day still at SWAA, not noticing that we’re two different organizations or not understanding how that happened. And, depending on how much you’re paying attention what’s going on legislatively? That makes sense, right? So often social workers are working really hard in their profession and doing a lot of stuff that they’re not necessarily paying attention to the nuances of particular legislation. So they are surprised.

So we have to do a better job, as SWAA and the ACSW to help people recognize those different functions and know where to go for what. And also why to support an organization like SWAA because we really are a collaboration of members. We’re just a group of individuals that really want to help advocate for our work and each other.

Absolutely. We’re talking about the divestment from ACSW that created SWAA. Can you tell us a little bit about what divestment means, and just for any social workers who are still a little unclear, how did that kind of come about? And then, of course, the birth of SWAA as a result.

 Divestment is a big word for actually a simple concept, which it’s just a breaking apart. And so the ACSW as it used to exist, the Alberta College of Social Workers, used to have programs that were intermingled with each other. And so the divestment is really about the government at the time had decided that it did not want professional associations, not just social work, other health professions as well. They didn’t want them to be both regulatory and professional associations.

The people you would go to for support isn’t necessarily the same as the people who could potentially sanction or produce regulations that are, not necessarily in one individual’s best interest, right? Part of the regulatory body is really about that public interest. How do we protect the public in those situations. Where the work that we do is really about protecting and supporting the social worker in this particular case. And so the divestment is really just a separation.

And so it took a while and it was mandate like we had two years to divest. And what that really was is about separating which role was which, because some of them were intermingled in different ways. And so the idea is that somehow we could operate completely independently.

Now, the ACSW did give us some funding out of their pot to help us support the Social Work Association in order to start creating it. And so that is part of the divestment as well. The ACSW did support the beginning building of the Social Work Association in order to help us become an entity on our own, which of course is super valued.

But now we always want more. But that’s part of what associations are like. We always want more and we would love a more support.

And one of the things that the divestment did as well is the Social Work Association of Alberta has to get its own membership fees, right? So membership to the ACSW as a registered social worker, that doesn’t come to us. We are completely separate. And so the ACSW has its own funds based on registration and government support. And we have our own funds that comes specifically from our membership. And that can be complicated of course, because social workers, that means you’re paying two different bodies for different work.

And that is also understandably difficult for some of our workers, especially those working in jobs that aren’t necessarily as highly paid as others.

Absolutely. So if I’m hearing you correctly one of the biggest benefits of divestment is now both organizations can fulfill its mandate in helping to the best of its ability, the person or people that it’s meant to serve. Now the College can focus on the public and SWAA focus primarily on supporting its members, which is the social workers.

I think that was the argument for sure. And I certainly have come around Kayla to that argument. I know my first reaction to the divestment process was actually not very supportive. And I know many of the social workers across the province felt the same way. But I do see how that separation can clean things up in a certain way and we get a lot of social workers coming to us wondering about advocacy work. What are we doing? It does allow us to do that in a way that they wouldn’t have previously been able to do with the ACSW.

Absolutely. So now I know we have some social workers listening and they might not yet be members of SWAA and they might be thinking, oh one, I didn’t know SWAA existed, and this sounds like an interesting organization to join. Or maybe they’ve heard of SWAA, but still on the fence of whether to join. Why should a social worker in Alberta consider being a member of SWAA?

 I’m on a soapbox here. I love the Social Worker Association. Of course, I’ve been involved for a number of years now, but I really love the idea of collective action. So many of us work in organizations that maybe we are the only social worker or we’re working in areas of practice in rural communities that we don’t have as much connection or support to each other. And I think that the Social Work association can build opportunities for that.

I think there are some people in the profession that have really taken a wait and see approach to becoming a member. Let’s see how they develop. If it develops in the way that I would like it to, does it give me some benefits back? And that’s okay. That makes sense that everyone earns their money in different ways and I can certainly respect that approach.

And certainly the first few years of the Social Work Association, we’ve been really focused internally. Policies, practice. How do we support the scaffolding of this organization in a way that maybe members weren’t able to see as much, right? Because we were in a collective.

Now, why do I think people should volunteer, be members, become involved in swat different ways? Because I do think that collective support is super important in our profession. It is what makes us connected to our social justice roots, this idea that we’re not just about doing a job, we’re also about societal change. And advocating for those changes. And that means really from my perspective, we have an ethical mandate to work within our profession.

And this is just how I choose to serve that ethical mandate. And I do know that other people would agree with me, and that’s part of why they’re membership as well.

I think that right now is a great time to become a member for a few reasons. One, we’re still new, so if you’re like, I don’t know what SWAA is up to, I’m not sure if they’re going in the direction I want them to do. Join because as we’re building those voices are the ones that we want to hear, right?

So because we’re so new, it is such a great place to be. The other reason is like for those individuals that really want something tangible out of it because, money is tight and, yeah, you need to have some return on your investment. SWAA offers a few things. We offer some connection to liability insurance, for instance, that the ACSW mandates that we have. And so we do have some ability to collectively approach different insurance providers. Then they can give us a bit of a deal on that, which is lovely. And that it fits the mandates of the ACSW as well. So it’s a nice way to make sure that gets covered. And so we do have some financial benefit to that.

There’s also lots of professional development opportunities that we are a part of. And so we have a relationship with PESI, so we, our members get discounts. We also are connected to the Canadian Association of Social Workers. So any of the membership privileges that you get as being a member of the Canadian Association, you also get, if you’re part of the Social Work Association without an extra fee, like anyone who is a member of SWAA is also a member of the CASW as well. So they have lots of private practice resources, for example, they have lots of professional development. And then we do our own local professional development.

What I also think is really important is that that professional development comes in different forms. So we do have mentorship communities that we’re starting to develop which is neat. So we have mentors and mentees from different areas of practice that are helping support each other in their practice, which I think is great. Because really social work is not just about collective actions, but taking care of each other. And our emerging social workers are ones that we worry about a lot, right? This field is difficult and making sure that there’s support there is helpful.

It also brings meaning to people who are practitioners who’ve been around a little bit to refresh their excitement about the field, which is cool.

We’re also community of practices are something that we’re just about to start, so that’s a new one. And that helps us with some of the mandates around the ACSW has f or us around regulation about engaging within our profession. And so our reaction to that is to create these communities of practice so that people can get together and learn and support each other in different ways. Now that one is new, so we’re only just starting with a few, and then we’re going to keep moving that up.

And then eventually we want to do things like more community of practice. We also want to talk about how do we do supervision, right? So we have all these RSWs, that are on provisional status. We want to find a way to help those individuals get the supervision they need to get off of that. So that’s coming up. And then of course we have our RCSWs that are looking for supervision. And so we’re going to try to find creative ways to make those things happen too. And so that’s part of the return of investment that we’re hoping to support because the more qualified social workers that we have out there doing whatever practice they want in their area is and the more professional ones we have, and the more support out there, the better work we’re doing for ultimately what it’s about is the people we work with.

That’s amazing. SWAA is doing so many great things for social workers in Alberta. Now you mentioned earlier that you have many lofty goals. So, I’m curious on what future directions does the association have and what are you planning for say in the near, maybe even a long term future?

 In the short term, you’ve heard about my interest in supervision and getting people off of their provisional status. We’ve talked about growing our community of practice, growing our professional development. One day, we would love to have a conference like the ACSW used to do. We would love to create that and get that moving. And so anyone who’s interested in volunteering to help support us in those things, we would love the help.

Really I want members to be part of the driving force of this organization. People who have specializations that they would like to share, we would love to talk about doing some professional development activities. That can help boost their individual profiles of the social workers which also boost the profile of the profession, more globally. Also writing articles, those kinds of things we would love to do. And certainly we have lots of goals right around these kinds of things. That may be a podcast one day around social work issues in Alberta specifically, right? Because we live in a very interesting political climate that is unique across the country. And so being able to discuss that and how do we work within this environment and the regulations that come with it. Yeah, it’s unique we would love to explore that in many different ways.

One of the other things that I would love to do is talk about advocacy. What is the lofty goal when it comes to advocacy is a tricky question because we live in this political environment that can sometimes expand or constrain different issues that we are managing in the work that we do. The difficulty is we can’t do everything and so the social work association, we often get very excited very eager individuals coming to us, really wanting us to pick particular issues to be doing advocacy on. And I have to say I love the passion of that. It’s really difficult for the organization to take on all of those tasks.

So what I know now is we’re really focusing on specifically this profession. How do we take care of social workers? And so how do we advocate for better pay? How do we advocate for better health benefits? How do we advocate for mentorship or supervision opportunities for our social work colleagues. How do we help support them in advocating for good, healthy workspaces? Those kinds of things is really where we’ve chosen to focus right now, which is great. But in the future, we would love to be in a place where we’re big enough, we have enough financial resources to do more advocacy work in different ways.

And so we would have to pick from our membership, which ones we want to focus on through our strategic plan every year. Because of course there’s lots of issues that are important to social work and the people we work with.

 So right now really what we choose to do is focus on educating people about the issues and empowering people to figure out how to do advocacy within their own lives and in their own community and in their own practice. And hopefully that’s a good starting place. But we would love to, of course, keep growing and doing more.

I absolutely love that. Krista, any listener would like to join SWAA. How can social workers get involved?

You become a member, which is the easiest way to become involved. And we send out a newsletter at least once a month, often more often. Then we also have social media. You can find us on the internet at myswaa.ca. So it’s myswaa.ca.

That’s probably the best way, and that’s where you can come and get a membership and get connected to all these different pieces of the organization, which is hopefully fun.

And of course, we are also on LinkedIn Instagram and in Facebook. So you go on Facebook so you can find us in all of those different places.

So to sign up for SWAA, head to myswaa.ca or simply scroll down through the show notes and click on the link.

Krista, thank you so much for joining us on the podcast today to share all the great things SWAA is doing for social workers in Alberta.

Thank you. I’m glad to be here.

And thank you everyone for tuning in to today’s episode, and I hope you join me again soon on The Designer Practice Podcast. Until next time, bye for now.

Credits & Disclaimers

Music by Denis Pavlov Music from Pixabay

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