Call for Presentations

     There was an incredible response to this year’s first ever hybrid conference. Attendee feedback showed an appreciation for the hybrid model and yielded one of the chapter’s largest attendance numbers in history. It is because of you that we can have a moment to breathe, reconnect, laugh, and learn. Thank you for sharing your knowledge, experience, and courage with us. Know that you mingled with over 700 folx attending, presenting, and exhibiting at this last conference. 

     More than ever, we must remain true to our ethics and values, by engaging others with compassion and patience. We need to continue to cultivate practitioners who value individuality, tradition, culture, and language. If we want change, then we must invest in the people and places that touch our future. Transformation cannot happen if money and energy are reactively and constantly poured into treatment programs. We can build all the houses that are needed, dispense all the medication assisting treatment for substance use disorder, raise reimbursement rates and teachers’ salaries, and we can even increase the number of students seeking degrees in behavioral health, teaching, nursing, and other certificate programs for direct care practice, but those improvements could never replace the importance of the human connection established by those that support our youth and families every day. Social work is recognized as the cradle to grave practice, working at every system level, in a multitude of professional settings. Yet oddly people wonder why there are not enough social workers in NM. 

     NASW-NM understands its responsibility as the prominent advocate for social workers and social work. We will continue to be in the places where decisions for change are made. The funding and support for social workers in behavioral health, school social workers, first responders, and other integrated settings must be adequate enough, so that social workers can do what they are charged to do successfully, in a safe and inclusive environment, with a humanistic approach, which is elevated by competence, funds, and policy. 

     There are more committees, task forces, and advocacy groups attending specifically  to workforce shortages. All the while, we know current professionals are barraged with criticism and emotional abuse from media, general public, politicians, employers, and payor sources. It is mostly occupied by female identifying folx and therefore grouped with helping/caregiving, though that entire group should be elevated and not be hostage to oppression and misogynist policy and value. The advocacy, the work, and the conditions are exhausting, even for the warriors. This profession is regarded as invaluable but compensated as disposable. 

     This year’s theme is Social Work, Resilient in Times of Change. We hope your expertise in the intersection of Structural and Social Determinants of Health (SSWDH) for those working directly with young people, families ,or guardians, will help to change the many negative perspectives held about this group of professionals. By improving the knowledge SSWDH we can create spaces where the security to share thoughts, ideas, knowledge, and creativity can be expressed. By teaching professionals how to use their voice in opposition to and question the status quo or any harmful determinant, they can positively influence practice, perceptions, and relationships with youth, parents, caregivers, and families, and truly make long and sustainable changes for New Mexico families. 

    This is not intended to be basic training, it should be relatable for every level of practitioner, regardless of the number of practice years or level of licensure. Everyone of us is responsible for the condition of our youth and families. Our health, education, and social determinate outcomes have not improved. We continue to occupy the bottom of national rankings that indicate healthy communities, policies, and people. Just as we attend to the intersectionality of a person, we must attend to the intersectionality of structural and social determinants. If we continue to treat parents as undeserving of positive regard and youth as unchanging, thinking both are stuck in the revolving door of legal, behavioral health and medical systems created by unjust, inequitable, rote treatment, inequitable policy, previous trauma, and unsafe environments, then we will maintain the negative construct of our youth and families.