All Webinars

Webinar Summary: 
This National Social Work and World Social Work Day will be unlike any other. March is a time to come together and celebrate the impact social workers have on their clients, their communities, and the healthcare field.
Social Workers are Essential. 

Although we may not be hosting in-person celebrations this year, CASW and the Senate of Canada have joined forces to host two online events aimed to celebrate, and honour, the work of Social Workers this past year.  
 
Webinar Objectives: 
This panel, comprised of Senators from the Social Work Profession, will present the ideas, peoples and places that have inspired them in their careers – the giants in social work -- as well as the individuals in our communities that have molded and mentored each Senator’s professional paths within the profession. 
 
Second, the Senators will speak on their work, as well as the Parliament of Canada in addressing pervasive and systemic racism in Canada, and the role of social workers in social justice movements.

As professionals, social workers exercise judgement and make decisions that require thoughtful reflection and critical thinking.  When addressing ethical issues, moral problems are rarely black and white. An ethical decision-making framework is a guide to facilitate informed ethical decision-making in the face of ethically challenging circumstances.  

Webinar Objectives 

This webinar will provide participants with an overview and introduction to an ethical decision-making framework. 

Strongest Families Institute (SFI) is an award-winning charity and a pioneer in distance e-mental health services for children, youth and families. SFI’s system of care and pediatric skill-based programs targeting behavioural challenges, anxiety and bedwetting have been proven in clinical trials. SFI leverages the advantages of technology, best science, and skilled telephone support coaches to deliver timely services to people when and where they need it. Especially now, during the pandemic, effective e-mental health services are important support for children and parents who are affected by the impacts of COVID-19. Families at risk are more susceptible to further decline in mental health due to the impacts of COVID-19. Equipping families with skills to better manage mental health challenges and build resilience can lead to healthier, more productive lives. SFI takes great care to adapt its programs to ensure care is customized to meet client/family needs. In this webinar, Dr. Pottie will provide an overview of SFI’s services and e-platform and will present on SFI’s outcomes, including case examples of at-risk families and an overview of SFI’s research and new innovations. 

Specific learning objectives for this presentation are to:

• Become familiar with SFI’s system of care, service and research programs, and program availability.
• Understand the benefits of SFI’s skill-based programs and impacts on children, youth and families, including case examples of high-risk families. 
• Understand SFI’s success with scalability and ability to rapidly reduce pediatric waitlists.
• Learn about SFI’s ongoing research and innovation programs.

This webinar covers various aspects of interprofessional collaboration (IP) that is used in SW practice to address complex situations that cannot be resolved in a compartmentalized manner (working in silos). 

The webinar also examines the important dimensions of IP collaboration, including roles and responsibilities, structure, and the collaborative process. In conclusion, the authors raise the importance of considering the benefits and implications for SW practice.

Webinar Objectives 
Key lessons:

• Complex situations encountered in practice that require IP collaboration and new models of intervention
• Definition and components of IP collaboration
• Aspects that facilitate and hinder IP collaboration
• Solutions to foster IP collaboration 
• Benefits of IP collaboration

This workshop will present a brief overview of the research related to Adverse Childhood Experiences (ACE) and how this science can better equip social workers to assist clients to lead authentic, fulfilling, and autonomous lives. More than 2000 peer-reviewed studies make evident that ACEs are pervasive and associated with the development of numerous physical and psychosocial health issues across the lifespan. The ACEs framework incorporates ten most commonly experienced adversities in childhood that include: physical, sexual and emotional abuse and physical and emotional neglect, witnessing domestic violence; having parents who experience mental illness and/or substance abuse; having an incarcerated family member and the separation and/or divorce of your parents. Other studies also include experiences of racism, poverty, war, and natural disasters as adverse childhood factors that cause trauma.

Webinar Key Objectives: 

• Overview of Adverse Childhood Experience framework
• First Voice Reflection-Benefits of ACEs Knowledge
• Relevance of ACEs to Addiction and Mental Health Settings
• Steps Social Work Profession can take to lead responses to ACEs
• Benefits of an ACE lens to social work practice 

This webinar offers opportunities for social workers to enhance knowledge and skills of suicide postvention. Through story, song, lived experience, and theory, the presenter will review the complicated nature of suicide and share how Narrative practices may be applied to help survivors of suicide loss (SoSL) focus on the lives lived rather than the cause of death.

The webinar objectives are:

• To examine the complicated nature of suicide loss  
• To enhance understanding of appropriate language related to suicide postvention
• To foster curiosity and desire to apply Narrative Theory and Practices to suicide postvention
• To enrich social workers’ postvention toolkit with a repertoire of questions to explore in therapy;  guidelines for practice; and healing ideas for work with SoSL
• To hear inspirational stories of how SoSL in NL are creating legacy and changing the way we look at suicide loss

This purpose of this webinar is to provide social workers, who are relatively new to group facilitation, with some ways to think about their groups regardless of the issue bringing people together. The first half of the session will look at the key considerations for group facilitation relevant for both face-to-face and online service delivery. The concept of mutual aid in groups, the role of purpose, the stages groups move through, the development of norms and the concept of universality will be reviewed. The second half of the webinar will focus specifically on the benefits and challenges of moving our groups to an online platform. While social work has used technology in the past for group work purposes, the ability to use Zoom as a means of providing group work services is relatively new. Its use has escalated due to COVID-19 and our resultant need to socially distance. This means of delivering group services may continue to remain a viable option, even after the pandemic restrictions are lifted. Ideas for creating connection, for establishing group norms within the virtual environment, and general lessons learned from facilitating groups via Zoom, will be shared.

Webinar Key Objectives: 

• To explore the concept of mutual aid in groups 
• To review basic group processes
• To explore the benefits and challenges of facilitating online groups via Zoom
• To provide resources for social workers facilitating groups

·  To understand how individuals and organizations can support child welfare worker resilience and wellness
·  To become familiar with current research on PTSD and vicarious trauma for child welfare workers
·  To learn about holistic wellness from an Indigenous perspective

The Youth in Care Chronicles is about the lived experiences of former youth in care, now as resilient adults, who want their voices to be heard. Youth in care are often represented in poorer health outcomes, homelessness, suicide, trafficking, and poorer educational outcomes. However, the narratives included in this book from 18 former youth in care provide a fresh look at moving beyond growing up in the child welfare system. The Youth in Care Chronicles shares experiences of pain and trauma faced by those in the child welfare system yet and towards the future with boundless hope and resilience. This webinar will focus on the implications for social workers to positively and actively impact the lives of youth in system care. A critical element of this book is a learning guide co-written by the editorial team which includes social workers, a child and youth care worker, a social work professor, a writer, and key messages from former youth in care themselves.  

Webinar Objectives

• History of the Youth in Care Chronicles book
• A brief description of the social issues that youth in care face
• Overview of the themes in the former youths’ stories that impact professional social work practice through the book’s learning guide
• Lessons learned along the way about community organizing and grassroots publishing
• Discussion and questions

Indigenous and Black people in Canada are disproportionately targeted and killed by police.  They are also disproportionately involved in systems of child welfare.  The Canadian state, it seems, insists on supporting Indigenous and Black families - even as it insists on taking Indigenous and Black life.  This apparent paradox is resolved by the reality that both practices, ultimately, secure the subordination of those disadvantaged by the racialized settler-colonial project.  ‘Hate’ and ‘love’ are not only compatible but collaborative.    

As those in the profession of administering care, social workers are a ‘benevolent’ cog in the machinery of White supremacy.  This presentation dissects the operations of this cog in relation to LGBTQ+ asylum seekers/refugees – a group of displaced people both produced by White supremacy, and exploited to perpetuate it.  It reflects on racism as more than interpersonal violence but structural denial, and situates the role of care work in facilitating, legitimating, obscuring, and erasing this. 

Webinar Objectives 

-          Recognize the role of ‘benevolence’ in the perpetuation of White supremacy

-          Recognize the continuities between social work’s past and present, in the perpetuation of White supremacy

-          Recognize the racialized origins and racializing effects of refugee practice and discourse 

-          Recognize mental health knowledge as a system of power, towards the perpetuation of White supremacy

-          Recognize ‘cultural’ knowledge as a system of power, towards the perpetuation of White supremacy

-          Recognize mainstream sexual and gender discourse as particular rather than universal