Dear IASSW Colleagues,
As an institutional member of IASSW, we want to provide you an update on the progress we have made in working through the challenges that have presented between IFSW and IASSW. In September, we notified you about our concerns with IF’s development of an interim Education Commission that it claimed would close ‘the gap between social work education and practice’. During the past several months, we have continued to engage with IFSW in good faith to work through our differences and sustain our international collaboration and partnership.
We have had the opportunity to discuss with IFSW the aims of the Education Commission. It seems that they now hope that this work will ‘lead to the alignment of social work programs with the Global Definition of Social Work and The Statement of Ethical Principles’. The interim Education Commission has invited representation from services users and from IASSW. As the current aims of the Education Commission seem less duplicative of the work of IASSW, we have asked Dr. Antoinette Lombard to serve as the IASSW representative on the Education Commission.
On other fronts, our collaborative work continues. We continue to work with IFSW on a task force related to the Statement of Ethical Principles as well as starting the process to develop a new collaborative document on the Global Standards for Social Work Education. In addition, we continue our collaboration with IFSW, ICSW and SAGE publishing on the International Social Work journal. We are moving forward with plans for our 2020 IASSW, ICSW social work and social development conference in Rimini, Italy, 29 June – 2 July.
We stress that we strongly believe that cooperation and partnership between IASSW, IFSW and ICSW are critically important for the global social work community. We are committed to finding the best ways to overcome our differences, for re-establishing trust and a positive relationship with IFSW for the enhancement of social work education and practice in the world.
Sincerely,
Annamaria Campanini
President, International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW)
Prof. Phd. in Servizio Sociale
Dipartimento di Sociologia e Ricerca Sociale
Università Milano Bicocca
Via Bicocca degli Arcimboldi 8
20126 Milano