The ACLU has defended civil liberties for all since its inception in 1920. When most people think of the ACLU, they may think the only advocacy professionals who work for the organization are attorneys. However, there are many kinds of advocates that work at the ACLU and help protect Constitutional rights and freedoms, including social workers. In fact, of the founding members of ACLU National, three were social workers at a time when the social work profession was first taking shape: Jane Addams, Crystal Eastman, and the ACLU’s first Executive Director, Roger Baldwin.
For more than one hundred years, social workers have helped shape and evolve the organization’s advocacy efforts around free speech, racial justice, disability rights, criminal legal system reform, drug decriminalization, immigrants’ rights, LGBTQ+ rights, reproductive freedom and government surveillance. Social workers are not only encouraged to advocate in the face of inequity and injustice but are ethically bound to do so.
As stated in the National Association of Social Workers (NASW)’s Code of Ethics Preamble, “Social workers are sensitive to cultural and ethnic diversity and strive to end discrimination, oppression, poverty, and other forms of social injustice. These activities may be in the form of direct practice, community organizing, supervision, consultation, administration, advocacy, social and political action, policy development and implementation, education, and research and evaluation.” As social workers, we not only provide direct services to clients like most think, but we also advocate for continued systemic change and protection of all our clients at the policy level.
As a Policy and Advocacy Intern at the ACLU of Ohio, I have been able to apply the skills of policy advocacy, policy research/analysis, and policy development that I am learning in my Master of Social Work classes to help improve the conditions of our youth justice system in Ohio both through statewide and local advocacy in Cuyahoga County. The thing I have learned the most though, is that advocating for these youth on a systems-wide level is not only social work, it is the only way that we can continue to improve material conditions so that more young people will not be impacted by the juvenile justice system in the future.
The ACLU’s vital work is absolutely litigation and legislative advocacy, but it is also social work in every sense. Now more than ever, social workers cannot only just support the work of the ACLU; we need to be active participants in the organization’s continued fight for civil liberties so we can create a more equitable country to live in: with true liberty and justice for all.
