Vision and Mission

We engage in relationship building within our School community that fosters trust, creativity, collaboration, and respect. We commit to collaborative, community-engaged scholarship, teaching, and practice. Connection is role modeled in all areas of our work.

We embrace the inherent worth of all people. By taking the position of cultural humility and applying the lens of intersectionality, we seek to develop and promote modes of anti-oppressive social work and dismantle structures of exclusion.

We demonstrate our integrity and trustworthiness as scholars, educators, practitioners, and community members by promoting social work values, ethical practice, and the process of critical reflection through authentic relationships with others.

We recognize that racial, social, economic, and ecological injustices are the root causes of inequities and that multiple strategies are necessary to address these. We see community and individual strengths as the foundation for systemic transformation. Our work integrates micro, mezzo, and macro social work approaches and aims to build collaboration across systems and disciplines to create change. 

We conceptualize competency, not as a stable end goal, but as a critical foundation of knowledge, values, and skills on which to deepen engagement across levels and systems toward transformation.

We use critical inquiry to analyze and challenge existing structures and systems to promote racial, social, economic, and ecological justice. We engage in deliberate and continuing examination of these social conditions to implement solutions.

We produce responsible and accountable knowledge that contributes to social work and surrounding fields. We value multiple sources of knowledge and ways of knowing. We invest in translational scholarship to shape and transform anti-oppressive social work practice and policy across systems.