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A Rewarding Group Worker's Journey

On a sunny morning in October 1986, I was sitting at a café on the main piazza of Perugia, a beautiful hilltown north of Rome. I was playing hooky from teaching at the University of Toronto, having accompanied my husband, who was planning a conference with fellow economists. He had brought along a book by Leonardo Boff, the Brazilian liberation theologian. I, being a social worker and no doubt feeling somewhat guilty, had only brought work. That particular morning, however, I just could not go down to have my caffè latte with a social work text, so I picked up Boff’s (1985) Church: Charism and Power. As I read, I recall thinking: “social workers don’t often write like this anymore”–even though I knew that, in Boff’s passionate defense of the poor and oppressed, and in his plea to rethink the role of an institution which had become much too concerned with its own power and status, many social workers would feel, as I did, an instant and profound recognition of the ideals that brought us to social work in the first place. I will not call that moment an epiphany–the notion is too weighty for the light-hearted mood that came with skipping school. But it did bring home to me how timid, as a whole, the social work profession was in standing up for–in caring about, one could even say–the interests of the poor, the marginalized, and the disempowered. And it pushed me to look more closely at what I believed social work to be about, and to translate this more emphatically in my writing, my research and my teaching.