Beverley Barnett Jones MBE and Tim Fisher, two social workers from different generations, genders, racial identities, and lived experiences, engaged in a dialogue about the practice of social work as a human response service. As the storyteller John Berger suggests, "sometimes first impressions gather up the residue of centuries." This might apply here, providing a potential explanation for the connection inspired by Bertha Capen Reynolds.

Beverley

At the point of meeting Tim, I was on the verge of surrendering to the exhaustion induced by years of calculative practices, practices intended to ensure that care and compassion remained central to my approach and those I trained, taught, and managed. However, Bertha pushes us to do more, to practice a radical tenderness. She encourages us to look into our own minds, thoughts, and feelings, thereby humanising Social Work.

Bertha positioned the act of thinking and experiencing feelings as a conscious and purposeful stance on the importance of self-compassion and compassion towards others. She saw Social Work as a humane activity, one that has, at its core, the duty to uphold a client's dignity, foster a sense of belonging, and advocate for a just society.

Reading Bertha implies engaging directly with the consciousness we must bring to our practice, which involves intricate power dynamics. We recognize the inherent complexity of our work environment, which seeks to prevent harm while paradoxically also causing harm. We are aware that our legitimacy is not inherently granted by the people we serve, but rather from the state. Both Tim and I have spent significant periods operating within a regulatory environment of care that prioritises proceduralization, thereby rendering the professionalism of social work as distancing oneself from the "other."

what we did?

We launched a social media campaign, weaving a thread between the Black Country, Smith College Massachusetts, Goldsmiths, Manchester, and Camden Town. With a bravado attitude for Bertha, we announced the campaign because Bertha showed that social workers must sometimes challenge the institutions they work within and around. She did this in a unique and necessary way when she advocated for Black students' admission to Smith College in the 1930s.

We wanted to involve colleagues in a conscious process of representing her work. Activists on social media, we were interested in utilising her quotability, building her eminence with the evidence of her words and their power. In our online community, we embraced modernity, infusing imagery and colour, placing photos of BCR in pop culture graphical arrays.

We brought our dialogue with Bertha to the JSWEC Social Work Research Conference, a workshop at Goldsmiths, and the Kempe International Conference.

Bertha's relevance for our current context is profound. She practiced during the Great Depression, witnessing its devastating impact on individuals' dignity and well-being, their families, and their communities. It was during this period that Bertha developed her foundational theories found in her seminal work, "Social Work and Social Living." Encountering this book was a joy for us, as it highlighted the power of learning from practice.

Bertha influenced us, our language, and our events. We acted and initiated a movement "Closer to people," one of Bertha's slogans. She says, "it is an equally critical question for social workers whether we shall let the contradictory attitudes toward people which confuse our society today shape our practice to the destruction of professional standards. Or shall we be active, ourselves, as people engaged in social living, to make one consistent whole out of our philosophy and practice?"

Bertha is the mother of a movement. We call for radical tenderness and a critically compassionate practice. What does it mean to aspire to deep belonging? How do we belong to anything? Social work should speak to this.

Remember

"The real choice before us as social workers is whether we are to be passive or active. Shall we let the existing forms of social work, full of contradictions as they are, shape us to their mould? Shall we let customs which may have prevailed in our agencies for so long that nobody thinks about them any more determine our practice? Shall we be content to give with one hand and withhold with the other, to build up and tear down at the same time the strength of a person’s life? Or shall we become conscious of our own part in making a profession which will stand forthrightly for human well-being, including the right to be an active citizen?" 

Bertha Capen Reyolds 1934