Vision and Mission

Guiding Principles & Values

Relationship Building

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.

Access, Belonging, Respect and Success

We embrace the inherent worth of all people. The School seeks to develop and promote social work values and practices and dismantle structures of exclusion.

Practice with Integrity

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

Multisystem Competency

The School recognizes the need to elevate the pursuit of justice. Multiple strategies are necessary to address this pursuit. We see community and individual strengths as the foundation for 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.

Critical Perspective

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

Empirically Informed Social Work

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 social work practice and policy across systems.

Our Goals

1. To prepare B.S.W., M.S.W., D.S.W., and Ph.D. students to practice with integrity and attain multi-level competency while working to promote well-being and build community.
2. To conduct, disseminate, and translate theoretical and empirically informed scholarship and research that impacts the social work knowledge base and transforms practice and policy.
3. To promote social, economic, and environmental justice through service at local, state, national, and international levels.

Our Promise

With each relationship, we vow to be a true partner by providing an environment that encourages forward thinking and creates experiences that drive positive change.

As a School within a comprehensive, premier research university, we strive to:

• Offer innovative programming that recruits, graduates and supports uniquely qualified and compassionate social workers,
• Drive discoveries that transform lives, and
• Embrace our responsibility to promote justice in Kansas, the nation and the world.