Mission Statements
Mission
The School of Social Work at 51³Ô¹ÏÍø is a center of excellence for lifelong learning in social work and human services in Rhode Island and Southeastern New England. We provide the highest quality education, training and advocacy, and we are committed to achieving social and economic justice in accordance with the NASW Code of Ethics.
Vision
The 51³Ô¹ÏÍø School of Social Work is a regional leader in making Rhode Island and beyond a place where:
- racial
- social
- economic
and environmental justice for all is the norm.
The faculty, staff, and students are diverse and reflective of the communities we serve, challenging ourselves to think critically and act justly. We work with our community partners to educate and mentor students to use their social work practice to engage in innovative--including use of state-of-the-art technological tools-- critically reflective, and anti-oppressive practice and leadership.
We are accountable to local, national, and global communities. The school offers a high-quality education, with a curriculum focused on evidence-based clinical and policy-related interventions, and social justice through bold action and advocacy.
Mission Statement The BSW program seeks to educate future social workers in a manner that results in them becoming critical, creative, skilled, and compassionate practitioners. We frame issues in social work and the larger culture in a manner that places social, racial, gender, economic, and climate justice as primary lenses through which we approach our world and our work. Following a person-in-environment approach, our graduates will understand that neither the individual nor the community is their client, rather it is the relationship between those two on which we focus our efforts. Our graduates will understand the symbiotic relationship between an individual and their community must be continuously promoted and maintained. Our graduates will enter the profession as generalist practice social workers prepared to engage in research-informed practice and practice-informed research. We cultivate a spirit of curiosity and inquiry, equipping students to use research as a means of empowerment, innovation, and systemic change. We prepare students to work ethically with individuals, families, groups, organizations, and/or communities within an anti-oppressive framework that recognizes historical actions, emphasizes human rights, expands opportunities, and transforms unjust systems locally, nationally, and globally. In this pursuit, we will challenge our students to offer individuals and systems the respect and dignity to which they are entitled. To do this, we teach our students that all individuals are a product of the environment in which they exist. We further challenge them to recognize that, while all individuals and systems have evolved to reflect accepted cultural norms and traditions, human rights are non-negotiable. Poverty, oppression, and suffering in all forms, must be eliminated and our graduates will be agents of social change, prepared to create a just, equitable, and sustainable future. And they will be prepared to do so because they will be trained to serve others above themselves and to serve skillfully and honestly.
The mission of the 51³Ô¹ÏÍø MSW program, as part of a larger Hispanic Serving Institution, is to foster social workers on a quest for social, racial, economic, and environmental justice who have the expertise, critical reasoning skills, global perspective, and passion to practice transformatively as clinicians, advocates, organizers, leaders, and scholars for human and community well-being. Our program is uniquely positioned to address the needs of our community and to advance the profession by preparing social workers who are committed to ethical, inclusive, and justice-oriented practice, built on knowledge based on scientific inquiry, in accordance with the NASW Code of Ethics and hinged on the profession’s core values of service, social justice, the dignity and worth of the person, importance of human relationships, integrity, and competence. The MSW program prepares students to recognize the critical importance of anti-racist, decolonizing, culturally sensitive, person-in-environment, and structurally aware practice that honors the dignity and worth of the person and respects human diversity to create the conditions that facilitate the realization of human rights, the elimination of poverty, and the enhancement of the quality of life for all people, locally and globally. Graduates are committed to continuous reflection and life-long learning in value and service of these goals.
