Statement from social workers in Slovenia organised in the group 'Direct social work' as part of the Revolution 15o (15th October 2011) and Occupy Ljubljana movements

 Why direct social work? Why join the Revolution 15o?

Most of us do not want to work indirectly:

•     Maintain closed spaces
•     Maintain the existing order
•     Work with paper and not with people
•     Be a buffer to the strokes of raging capitalism
•     Be a supervisor of the poor (and be on the edge of poverty ourselves)

We want to:

•     Be with the people
•         Be a witness
•         Listen to the people talking
•         Be part of the history
•         Make sense of our work

•     Resist the economisation of everyday life and relations between people
•         Loneliness
•         Medicalisation (and commercialisation) of distress
•         Bureaucratisation of human relations and work

•     Work together
•         Make your knowledge and experience available to others
•         Find new solutions
•         Invent new organisations
•         Create new COMMON responses
•         BE DIRECT – BE SOCIAL!

Direct Social Work 15 o Motions:

Mobilisation of the social work, social workers and users.
 
Direct advocacy for the issues brought into the movements, for the people who express their grievances.
 
Occupation of social institutions to make them serve the people.
 
Direct social work actions.
 
Direct funding – money for change!
 
Join today and whenever needed.
 
A SOCIAL WORKER IS THE ONE WHO WORKS SOCIALLY!
 
Direct Social Work
 
Not to be servants of financial capitalism, supervisors of expenditure of the poor!
 
To become an advocate for the people, join the movements today.
 
Social work emerged from working class movements for social justice – and became in time a mediator between the state and the people. Social workers became expropriated, too.
 
With neo-liberalism social work has become a global profession – to mend and reduce the harm done.
 
But social work is also an opportunity for those who are pushed into the shadow of silence to speak, for those who have become dependent on others to take the things in their own hands.
 
We need to relinquish roles in which we treat people as things, in which paper is more important than deed, and by which we serve disablement and not empowerment.
 
Enough of the indirect social work, enough of the paperwork, enough of the closed institutions, enough of social cripples.
 
15o is an opportunity for social work, an opportunity to become directly responsible to the people

Join the open group on facebook on https://www.facebook.com/groups/174578142625993/ (posts are mainly in Slovene).

Forwarded by Vito Flaker via Rea Maglajlic