Making the case for strenghtening the SSW across sectors
Guest blogger: The Global Social Services Workforce Alliance
With the world experiencing more protracted conflicts, more frequent climate-related disasters and more severe and widespread disease outbreaks, most notably the current COVID-19 pandemic, social service workers have increasingly been playing key roles in helping people and communities prepare, adapt and respond.
Every year, the Global Social Service Workforce Alliance hosts Social Service Workforce Week. The week serves as an opportunity for advocates to bring attention to and build support for the social service workforce as well as raise awareness about promising workforce strengthening efforts supported by stakeholders around the world.
This year, Social Service Workforce Week will be held from 17 October through 21 October 2022. The theme for the week is: Making the Case for Investing in Strengthening the Social Service Workforce Across Sectors. During the week, there will two virtual events, the release of three new guidance documents and the publication a series of blog posts and worker profiles to:
- examine the diverse roles of social service workers when located across various sectors, such as health and education, and within humanitarian contexts;
- exchange learning on how the social service workforce can work most effectively when located in community settings across these different sectors, and
- recommend strategies and interventions for planning and resourcing the social service workforce required for this range of roles, including how to use our costing and ratios guidance to plan the most impactful deployment of social service workers.
Social service workers play a crucial role in helping individuals, families and communities respond to and recover from humanitarian emergencies. They also help individuals, families and communities build their resilience to withstand future emergencies. However, despite their critical role at the frontlines, they largely remain undervalued and unrecognized.
More than 10,000 social services workers around the world rely on Primero to support their case work and monitoring every day. Giving social services workers the digital tools they need not only helps them deliver better services, it also helps to build their prestige and shine a light on the critical role they play in the community. Data about their daily work contributes valuable evidence to advocacy iniatiatives. Better data management systems help demonstrate the importance and reach of their work, and can be used to convince policy makers to invest more in the social services workforce. Primero recognizes that the only way to increase impact is by strengthening the social services workforce.
Support us is advocating for greater visibility for and investment in the Social Services Workforce. #SSWWeek