Welcome to Social Work Stories, a podcast exploring social work practice through stories and critical reflection.
This podcast is recorded on Aboriginal Country, which was never seated.
We acknowledge the traditional custodians and cultural knowledge holders of these lands and pay our respects to Aboriginal elders past, present, and emerging.
We offer a warm welcome to any Indigenous listeners who are part of our podcast community around the world.
If you have thoughts or feedback for our team, or just want to find our whole back catalogue of episodes, check out our website, socialworkstories .com.
But for now, on with the episode.
Welcome to the Social Work Stories Podcast.
My name's Liz Murphy, and I am recording today on beautiful Durrall country.
And just across the way, beyond the screen is my mate, Dr.
Mim Fox. Hello, Mim.
Hello, gorgeous Liz.
Hello, everyone. It's so good to be here with you.
Likewise, Mim. So good.
I know. So good. We'll share with the listeners who have been using, you know, the recording as an excuse to have, I don't know, maybe 90 minutes of a catch up just then.
Fantastic. I know. And we have traversed all topics of our lives, Liz, as we need to, right?
Like this is, I think this is the best self -care, the best medicine we can have, actually, is just sitting down and having a good old chat.
Do you know what, Mim?
In the morning now, I've got this practice, because I don't have to rush off to work.
Do I tell you I'm retired?
Anyway, I go yoga. Yep.
Hand weights. Ooh. And then I'm out the door, I'm ready to move.
Now, I feel like what we've just done conversationally is we've just done our yoga and hand weights.
We're ready now for the recording.
We are so on point, Mim.
Oh, I agree with you completely.
I'm going to say, Liz, that although I joined you on the yoga, I'm not sure I joined you on the hand weights, but I definitely threw in some meditation there as well in our preamble chat.
So I'm feeling quite zen and ready to go.
This is a good episode.
I really enjoyed this story.
I'm so glad you did, because this was a story that was volunteered.
You know, every episode, Mim, how often do we say, contact us?
Let us know if you've got a story.
Well, this beautiful social worker did.
And before we get to telling a little bit about who he is as a person or a social worker, I just want to say, just go back a few steps with me, Mim.
In the 80s, after social work students graduated, it wasn't uncommon for people to go overseas and work in UK, Canada, sometimes for a couple of years, sometimes for a couple of decades.
I did notice that when we had the financial crisis, a lot were kicked out of the UK and Canada and had to come back home.
But this is my long -winded intro into what this social work story has brought up for me.
And what it's brought up for me is the question of, if you study social work in a Western social work school, can you only work in countries that have a similar model of practice?
Or can you, as a social worker, practice in a non -Western country?
Because this is exactly what happened to this social worker, right?
And Mim, I'm curious about your thoughts on this.
It's hilarious that that's the question you pose, Liz, because that is the exact question that my PhD thesis was on.
And in fact, can you cross borders in your practice?
And is there an idea of a sub -profession, a section within our profession called International Social Worker?
So I think we've got a good discussion ahead of us, Liz.
Shall we listen to the story?
Let's do that. So before we put on the story, let me just tell you a little bit about the social worker.
So this is an Australian social worker trained and had also worked in Australia before they took themselves off with their family to Turkey.
And he practiced working as a social worker there for about seven years.
And so in his story, he's going to talk a little bit about the work that he did in Turkey, material aid, community development.
But he's also got a child protection story in there because that's where he comes from in terms of his professional practice in Australia.
He worked in child protection and he finds himself in Turkey with a child protection scenario playing out.
And then he does this wonderful reflection on what he discovered about himself and his practice and what it's like to be practicing in a country that's not your home.
And the lessons learned as a result of that.
And it is a beautiful story.
It's got all the bells and whistles, Mim.
But plus, we've got you to draw on in terms of your own studies in this topic.
Absolutely. If there's lots to talk about here, I'm keen to get into it.
Let's do it. I wound up working for an international organisation and I moved overseas to Turkey to support a social and community development project that was engaging with urban refugee populations.
And that felt like a really big sidestep for me.
Quite apart from what I was used to in child protection work, I knew pretty much nothing about Turkey apart from, I guess, what I'd remembered from high school history about Gallipoli.
Yeah, so it was a big step into the unknown.
For my first year, I was working on building up competency in speaking Turkish, just finding out how things worked alongside getting involved in this project.
At the time, the project was focused on material aid for about 3000 families, mostly from Syria and Iraq.
And that was quite a jarring experience, like even apart from the kind of cultural adjustment I was going through, and I was getting used to things as well, like Turkish organisational culture, which is quite hierarchical.
I had to get used to just being given orders and management being quite directive.
But also, it was jarring because we weren't really engaging with our families apart from that level of direct physical provision, and that felt quite alien to me.
They would come in, they would get their box of food or their clothing or whatever, and then leave.
And that was how the project wanted things to be.
We weren't consulting with them about what they wanted or needed.
We certainly weren't speaking with the refugee families about the resources that we had that we could share with them, what were their goals, what were the kinds of things that they wanted to see differently.
So much of that project seemed to be focused on quantifiable results that could be reported.
And I think I picked up pretty quickly that that's quite common in the international aid and development space because there's such a reliance on donor relationships.
You really need to be able to report your impact and that's best if you can count things.
And so for this project, it was very easy to do that if you've got boxes of food or whatever.
But the families themselves didn't really play into the interventions that were being done.
And as a child protection social worker, I think I was really struck by the absence of awareness or sensitivity to trauma, which we know so many people with forced migration experiences carry with them.
After that first year, I was able to change things up and join a multi -ethnic team that was coming together to start a community center, which was focused much more on sort of psychosocial supports and some basic practical skills for living in Toudkier in that middle space before moving on to a country
of resettlement. We got to step back as we were in that planning phase and ask ourselves, what would it look like for us to do some trauma informed care for people living here as refugees?
And that was, for me, quite a natural question.
But I think for some of the other staff, it was quite radical in a lot of non -Western countries.
I guess social work is really focused on alleviating material poverty and an understanding of trauma is sort of maybe an optional thing that they don't always get to.
But we really worked on trying to get some agreement on how can we help people living as refugees feel safe when they come to this community center?
And we tried to do that in a few different ways.
We tried to set up the physical space inside the center so that it was comfortable and felt warm and inviting.
So we actually kind of looked to Arab and Persian home designs and things like coffee houses for inspiration.
And we did that because we'd noticed that people who come to Toudkier as refugees spend a lot of time in government offices at the migration office at the UN and they'll go for like a whole day for their one appointment because it just takes so long.
And they're often being pushed around by, you know, officials being told go over there and sit down here and wait or not today.
And those offices have a pretty predictable aesthetic.
It's lots of tiled floors, white walls, plastic chairs, that kind of thing.
And so we really wanted to break those associations with bureaucracy and set things up to feel safe and comforting.
So we tried for lots of carpets and soft furnishings and floor cushions, armchairs.
We had a bookcase that had books that were in Arabic and Farsi and Dari and Turkish as well as English and tried to make it feel more like a home, someone's lounge room or some, you know, some coffee lounge where you can relax.
We tried to think really carefully about how we use language with the people that we worked with.
And there was a conversation I had with a young Iranian man that really brought that into focus for me.
He was part of that planning team.
And we were talking about, I think we were talking about translating our visions and values to have kind of up on the wall.
And he said to us, look, can we not use the word refugee?
Can we use a different word?
And I hadn't really thought about that and said, look, we don't always have an alternative word in English, but like, what do you mean?
Can you tell me more?
And he said, look, just it would really be good.
Like don't call us refugees.
And he started talking about why.
And he just had so many experiences in his own journey coming to Turkia as a refugee where that word had been really othering for him.
And, you know, I think about that now in the wider context, you know, Turkia hosts more than four million people who are refugees.
It's the biggest population of refugees in a single host country in the world.
And because of that and the, you know, the discourse, the political discourse around refugee populations has become so politically charged there.
The word refugee and, you know, in Turkish, the word muteji has become like a label that really invites discrimination.
You know, it suggests this kind of cultural otherness, you know, someone who's come from the outside and they have lots of needs.
They're going to take your jobs.
They're going to take your resources and live really well and not give back.
It's a really negative word.
You know, my Iranian friend was just so tired of everybody calling him refugee.
And I think he was saying like, it makes us like animals, you know, like this mass, you know, is there something else we can say?
And we kicked that question around about how we can describe people who have lived through forced migration.
And in the end, this man's suggestion was that we really use person centered language like people who live here as refugees or people who've survived forced migration.
We try to do some things like simple training as well for the staff about stress response and trauma and how it affects emotional regulation or people's executive function so that, you know, no matter who was on that day, what program or interaction we were having, you know, whether it was the Turkish
language learning group for women or the holiday kids club or whatever, like we could try and have that curiosity about people's behavior and an openness to what might have happened to them without necessarily us needing to know their story.
And I think that became quite an important feature of our work.
It was pretty common for us to have sort of ambivalent engagement with people and our staff would often get frustrated that, you know, you'd meet someone, you'd strike up a good connection with them.
You might see them at a program for a couple of weeks and then they'll disappear for a few weeks or months, then they'll pop up later.
You know, it was really hard to get really consistent work with some people.
So using trauma as that organizing idea in our team meetings to problem solve things like engagement meant that we were turning the conversation away from our difficulty and our irritation and more towards the client's difficulties.
Like what issues might be preventing them from working with us?
Is it, you know, that they have to work 14 hour days to afford their apartment's rent and they're just really tired?
You know, is it that they're a family with six or seven or eight children at home and they just don't have the capacity to come out at night to our group?
Is it that feelings of trust feel scary when you've had this long period of just not feeling you can trust anybody?
And over time we were able to extend that understanding of trauma into our client work, but doing that in a way that spoke across different cultures was quite a challenge.
I remember we'd started a group for young men.
It was mostly Syrian men and that group was really some peer support.
It was some debrief with each other, a space to get some emotional support and some positive friendships.
And we, you know, we did a little bit of psycho education in that group.
And, you know, a lot of the Syrians that we'd met had lots of multiple, you know, stacked stresses in their lives.
They had their own prior exposure to violence and conflict when they were in Syria to often quite traumatic journeys out of Syria and then difficulties adapting to life in Turkia and living with this ongoing discrimination and systemic problems like not being able to get a job or not being able to get
healthcare, so much stress.
But then when I tried to do things like engage them about mental health, it just wasn't working.
Like talking about the categories that I was, you know, explaining things like stress in, it just, it didn't seem to connect.
I tried to do a session on mood and stress response.
And these guys were telling me they'd never felt something like depression.
Even if I'd known them for a while and I'd absolutely seen them present with things like low mood or irritability or poor sleep, you know, or any of the other signs of something that would indicate, you know, a condition like PTSD, they would say that wasn't their experience.
I'd hear them say things instead like, you know, my heart is being squeezed or the world is dark in front of me or, you know, I'm tired or actually it was really common to hear them say Alhamdulillah, like praise be to God.
When you ask them how they're going, it was really hard for me to read that.
It was quite confusing.
I didn't know what it was telling me.
I'm really grateful.
I had an Egyptian colleague at the time who I worked with and he very gently, very kindly suggested that I was being too direct in trying to address a topic like mental health, which, you know, is really quite a loaded topic.
And in the Arab world, I guess, carries a lot of stigma to admit that your mental health's not so great.
And he told me it's kind of more like a dance, you know, you and this other person, you're trying to have a conversation about something sensitive, but, you know, you don't just come together straight away.
You're both moving around the topic, kind of getting closer, kind of going further away.
You're never quite touching it though.
And you just need to learn to listen to what they're saying, how they're saying it, what are they leaving out.
And that was a really, you know, counterintuitive thing for me, but it told me I really had to step back.
And in the end, I really watched how this Egyptian colleague of mine drove those conversations rather than me, you know, the social worker leading it.
It was just really interesting to see how he did that using things like stories as a way of discussing heavy stuff, you know, keeping things a little bit distant, a little bit removed from people's direct experience so that they wouldn't necessarily feel shame or embarrassment talking about it.
They could kind of talk about it through another experience.
Working in another culture and then working with cultural minorities in that other culture, I often felt like I was just flying blind, trying to connect my prior experience from Australia, theories and practices that I used here with, you know, very diverse communities.
Towards the end of my time at that project, we did have one of our participants come to us an Iraqi lady, and she shared with us that her daughter, who was nine, had recently disclosed to her that she'd been assaulted by her stepfather, who was this lady's husband, that there'd been a pattern of sexual
assault going on for more than a year.
And we weren't a child protection service, you know, in Türkir that's all handled by the police.
And this woman, I think, was quite fearful about going to the police because she was living there as a refugee.
Her daughter didn't have any documents.
But she came to us, I think, because she felt really uncertain about what to do.
She was really keenly aware.
I think that in her culture, she was already seen as a little bit tainted because she had been married to another man previously and was divorced, now had remarried this man who was the alleged perpetrator.
And so for her to do anything that compromised her marriage would be really putting her in a precarious position.
And it would really restrict her kind of cultural, social capital, you know, on top of all the other difficulties she had living as a refugee.
For me, I kind of felt like I'd sprung into action because it really activated all of those muscle memories about my child protection work, you know, in terms of identifying risk and protective factors.
You know, we talked with mum about the disclosure and about how she was going with that, the dynamics of things like grooming.
We made a safety plan.
I guess I also noticed that there were some really divergent views on our staff team about how to handle this, which were really different from how I was thinking.
Some of my colleagues were pretty adamant that we shouldn't be involved at all in this because it's a family matter and the family need to sort it out.
There were some people who wanted to support the stepfather, the perpetrator, to stay in the home because the mum would be at risk if he had to leave.
You know, the mum would be much more vulnerable.
I think there was even a suggestion that the stepfather needed to apologise to the child and then it would all be over.
We ended up meeting apart from with mum and with the daughter where we did that sort of initial containing work.
We then went and met with the stepfather separately.
We negotiated with him to leave the home voluntarily to take the immediacy out of things and then we went back to mum to work through some of her own reactions about what her daughter had experienced because even after the stepfather left the home, you know, she had a lot of ambivalence.
She did a lot of backing and forthing about recognising that her daughter had been really severely hurt in so many ways but then she would also want to reconcile with her husband as soon as possible and to do that work we relied a lot on Arabic speaking staff but then we also connected her with an Arabic
speaking psychologist from a neighbouring country and they were able to do some really focused work on the dynamics of sexual assault, the harm that the daughter had experienced, what the impact of that was likely to be long term and some strategies to deal with that.
At that time we also happened to have access to an expat play therapist who was living there at the time so we had a way to plug the daughter into some play therapy so she could explore her emotions in a safe space and start to process, yeah, what was happening to her.
I think we did do some good work with that Iraqi family in some ways.
I think they felt safe to come to us which was remarkable in some ways because of the shame attached to the issues and I think we did work really hard to let mum drive the safety planning and the intervention as it unfolded as much as she was able and felt able to do so.
I think in hindsight I do wonder if I should have slowed down and been more reflective about how my knowledge and skill set is really grounded in Western ideas about things like harm and safety and what it means to be child focused or even what it means for an intervention to be appropriate or effective,
even with something like child sexual assault which might seem a bit clear cut.
In the sense of urgency about trying to increase safety, maybe I rushed in too quickly to be directive to take some of that lead and to call the shots.
I wonder if I leaned too hard into seeing this lady and her daughter as victims not just of abuse and control from the stepfather which they I think absolutely were but also as victims of patriarchy in their culture which was having this secondary effect seeing their culture as something that was robbing
them of having a voice and having decision making power and agency and self -efficacy.
Now that might be true and it is true that in a lot of Arab cultures you know women don't have the same privileges as men but I think it reveals the kind of hidden colonialist thinking that I had internalized in my practice where I was seeing in this case Iraqi culture as less civilized than my own
or less safe than my own certainly inferior to my own and so I saw this lady and her daughter as you know people who needed someone from outside of their culture for their well -being.
Maybe what I should have done is look more at that family perspective you know what does it look like for the family to start taking ownership of this situation and mobilize resources and solutions what would collective responsibility and ownership look like in that context to bring some some safety
and some positive change.
More widely I often think back to what my Iranian friend said you know about don't call us refugees and I think about what have I learned from people with refugee experiences about power and working relationships you know so much western storytelling about these people focuses on suffering and misery
and victimhood and how incapacitated they are because of trauma and that can make us feel really good about being helpers but I think it can also be so disempowering because it makes us you know the practitioners the guarantors of someone else's psychosocial survival you know if nothing else working
with people who live as refugees you know working with people who come from cultural backgrounds quite different from mine I think they need to have the authority to tell their own stories and come up with solutions for the difficulties in their lives as a white practitioner as a western trained practitioner
you know I can have a lot to offer I can have ideas and and resources but I have also such a limited experience and a limited imagination and that can really distort my work in unhelpful ways so I think one of the big things I've taken away from from working across cultures now that I'm back in Australia is having
humility around engaging with families who are from different backgrounds from mine having a humility about my own limitedness and honoring cultural systems and values rather than trying to hold them at arm's length you know Liz uh listening to this story it takes me back to before I did my PhD I went
and did some work in Zambia and it was always my dream to go and be an international social worker right to go and work somewhere different and I was always in love with Africa and so I took the opportunity before I got married and had kids took the opportunity and went and did some work over there
and it started me on a bit of a train of thinking that this social worker talks about which is about are we practicing in the same way is it appropriate that we practice in the same way when we actually cross borders and go into another country and that's what I ended up doing my PhD on which was just
really fundamental in how I think about cross -cultural practice.
So Mim you're saying that you can relate to some of the questions that this social worker brings up about practicing in Turkey and some of the I mean I was really curious about his reflections about the lens that he brought into his practice and what he learned from having worked in the community with the refugee
community in particular.
Absolutely you can relate to that.
Absolutely and this notion that while we banter around the word refugee quite easily here in Australia and let's be clear we do have value judgments attached to that word when we use it here in Australia.
In fact it's one of the words I use as an example with students when I talk about the impact of discourse.
There is language that we use that has different meaning but when you take that word and apply it in an international context, Turkey and Iran have the highest numbers of refugees taking in the world right.
We do a lot of moaning in our country about how many refugees we take but in actuality it's a drop in the bucket so when you then use that word in any way loosely with people who have come from some of these countries the impact of the language you're using is significantly different.
It's felt very differently and so let's start at that point right before you even get to the practice let's start with what are the values that you are actually communicating when you're working with someone whose culture is different to your own.
Mim I really liked the way that this social worker told the story of the consultation group that he was working with in relation to developing a community center right and that wonderful conversation with the Iranian man who actually similarly to what you've just said talked about how loaded the term
refugee is and I think one of the quotes that I wrote down Mim was it's a label that invites discrimination he said and then he talked about you know what would be a better term that we could use and I think he said things like people who live here as refugees or people who have survived forced migration and that's
what you're talking about Mim isn't it just that discourse and I guess I'm curious about you talking a little bit more about what happens as a result of this type of discourse.
Well as soon as you don't be critical of the language that you're using you then can make excuses for making assumptions you don't acknowledge it right so straight away you are approaching someone with that in the back of your mind and it's that implicit bias concept right we hold a bias we hold a perspective
but we don't realize that we are we don't realize how that gets enacted until we're called out that example of how he worked with that consultation group it really rang true for me from when I was in Africa in Zambia working with a I had a group consultation group as well we were running grief and loss
workshops with community leaders and I would always reality check with them because there were things coming up constantly where I would say why didn't that idea land or why why was that response why was when I said this did I get that response and unless you've got someone there to reality check you
to actually give meaning to the moment therefore to force you to critically reflect it's really hard to come out of your implicit bias you actually need to be able to step above that and look critically on yourself and say why am I reacting the way I'm reacting and there is no one who can do that more
truthfully and authentically for you and with you in partnership than a solid relationship driven consultation group or reference group I'd also dared to say it is a certain person though that will really reflect deeply like this social worker right so I feel like I feel very grateful in the way he
was vulnerable in his practice reflecting in the doing really questioning what is it that I actually bring here and I think it actually really had me thinking about that do we go in as western social workers do we go in with this savior approach like I think that's what he was questioning am I here
another form of colonialism you know that's my form of practicing as a social worker another form of colonialism absolutely absolutely Liz I'll give you a really simple example that I often tell my students when I was running these grief and loss workshops I would start to train on grief support skills
and so I would talk about things like paraphrasing and the my African colleagues in the room would say to me if someone reflected back my thoughts but didn't tell me what to do just rephrased my words even if it sounded supportive I would think they were lying to me wow that's not authentic in our communication which flies
in the face of what we teach our students right that's exactly right so I then worked with my team around well how do we talk about this what is another way to provide that grief support and to show support without being directive or overpowering in providing a solution all the time yeah what's a more
supportive way to do that and so we did it together we worked together on that and that's why I want to take our listeners back to that episode on Ubuntu when we talked about the African philosophy of Ubuntu which was about actually working collectively and coming from a communal stance what this social
worker is talking about is actually an indigenized form of practice that the way to resist the colonization of our profession which is very deep let's be very clear that social work has colonialist roots and the way to actually critique that and resist that is through cultural humility and that's what this social
worker showed us so you know people will know that over time lots of different words have been bandied around cultural competence you know cross -cultural practice these things bandied around but now the we have all settled to really understand it as cultural humility and that was really demonstrated
by this social worker at the end when he spoke about how do I let the family lead me in what they need in how they are approaching this child protection issue that actually how do I resist the notion of a family unit as I know it in a western context how do I allow the family themselves to teach me
about what they need that is cultural humility because you are allowing the family to show you their cultural lens rather than you putting your cultural lens onto them does that make sense Liz?
Totally makes sense and I really appreciate that Mim because it clarifies it a lot and the other thing as you were talking I was thinking about that the language so back to our point about language what did you think about when he was talking about the issue of possible depression being experienced
or post -traumatic stress being experienced by some of the I think they were Iranian men you know like in our culture we probably say they are experiencing complex PTSD or depression but I love that conversation with his Egyptian friend who was actually talking about they don't articulate they don't
talk about it like that they talk about it like my heart is squeezed and I love that metaphor of the dance you just don't go straight in there like you do if you know here we go straight in there especially in health right diagnosis prognosis bang treatment yeah yeah oh it really makes me think about those
screening questionnaires Liz in the emergency departments and things do you experience low mood tick do you experience on a scale of one to five where would you put your mood right now where would you put your mood in the last 24 hours like come on yeah I don't even know what kind of dance that one
is but I love that metaphor of the gentle dance you've got to ease in and it makes sense you know it makes beautiful sense even in no matter what context I feel like what a great reminder I mean if we're going in there and getting deep with someone yeah it's a dance people absolutely yeah don't go straight
in there you gotta actually have a dance you know it was my um Nepalese students who taught me that in Nepal as well mental health is not spoken about in this way in the way we do this is the majority of the world do not communicate in clinical and diagnostic terms right that is not their experience
of mental health so for us to be able to properly communicate and support with the people who are needing it we need to find another way and this is the way cultural humility learning from people themselves absolutely learning from different cultures changing up your approach I feel like this is um
the plea I'm constantly making Liz is to be person centered in your approach and so Mim we started our episode with that question of can can I practice in another country yeah so what I hear you saying is cultural humility is one of the keys to this cultural humility is the key but there's also this notion of international
social work and I think we have to come to terms with that fact that there is a sub profession here because it is slightly different and that developmental social work is another strand of the of a similar along similar um lines but there are differences but similar and I I think an eco social work
has taken it in a different direction as well but I think we really do need to come to terms with this idea that we are so heavily steeped in colonial practice in social work in the developed world that we actually really need to think again about how we communicate as an international social worker
and one of the big things that if you think through the definition of international social work is that it's not just about working with people in another country international social work is actually practiced here all the time it's practice with people who have come from another country and are living
a different cultural experience to the one you are now and that's a really important angle to international social work really important so when students go on placement and they are working in a migration agency or they are working in a multicultural center or they are working in you know a um trans
cultural mental health service a hospital setting with different cultural groups absolutely you are practicing international social work so rather than thinking how do I apply my western social work to this situation there are some of these principles that are really fundamental in international social
work like cultural humility that you need to come to ground you right it gives you a theoretical but also a practice space in that space I love how you just flip that then dr they don't give me a phd for nothing yeah I mean in terms of your phd mim um was it ever written up as a absolutely there are articles
out there um I encourage people to if you're interested in this area there are my articles but there are a whole lot of our colleagues who have contributed significantly to this space so yeah absolutely we can put some links in the show notes a bit of light reading but also this has been a subject that for one
I don't think we've ever had a story like this before min and I'm so glad that it got to link in with something you feel incredibly passionate about and I feel like my brain's grown in the course of this conversation so thank you for that and and a very big thank you to this social worker who shared
such an interesting and layered story with us yeah it was it was really such an interesting story and I really appreciate the social worker reaching out Liz like you said before we ask people to share stories all the time but really if you've got a story out there to share send it through but also um
thank you so much it was really great thanks everyone and take care yes take care of yourselves we hope you have a good month all the best bye bye thanks for listening to the social work stories podcast all of the stories we share are de -identified to respect and protect the people involved we create
this podcast because we're passionate about building the global social work community and strengthening our practice no matter the context if you want to help us grow the podcast tribe and continue the work we do we would love it if you can subscribe or follow the podcast in your favorite podcast app
that way you'll be sure to get every episode as soon as it's released while you're in your podcast app if you can leave us a five -star rating and write a review it would mean so much to us you can connect with us on instagram twitter facebook and linkedin where you can share our posts with your friends
to help spread the word and you can always find us at our home on the web socialworkstories .com the social work stories podcast is made by liz murphy dr mim fox justin stesch dr ben joseph and maddie stratton thanks so much for listening
