Bristol SWAN roundup by Louise Isham, September 2011

On 23 June 2011 Bristol SWAN held a meeting at Hamilton house, Stokes Croft which included social workers, social care workers across Bristol, where we discussed the current climate in which we work and how we in Bristol SWAN could organise ourselves more effectively.

The debate was called ‘social work in crisis, re-imagining social work’ with speakers from Bristol Older People’s Forum, the local UNISON branch and the SWAN steering committee.  Around fifty practitioners from across the city shared concerns about the pressures and changing nature of their work.  This provided an invaluable chance to pool information about the so-often ‘hidden’ knowledge of front-line work and the effect of cuts and local decision-making on service users and communities.  We discussed actions of national SWAN and also other activist groups, positively campaigning against the cuts such as our colleagues in Southampton. We agreed several action points from the meeting and organised a further meeting on 23 August.

Some of the things we agreed to do as a branch, was to send out a monthly newsletter adapting SWAN’s National newsletter for the purpose, support people living in Dale farm who are facing eviction, support the wider cuts initiative being called and coordinated by anti-cuts alliance BADACA. We agreed to support the demonstration lobby that took on 6 September against the cuts to local authority run care homes, and care home staff some of whom provide a night-time service and massive cuts to funding of several third sector organisations, most of which will not survive these cuts.