Social Work Archives - Nicole Clark Consulting

23 Jul, 2025

Try This: Leading Strategic Planning with a Social Work Lens

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2025-07-23T08:42:52-04:00July 23rd, 2025|Categories: Strategic Planning & Sustainability|Tags: Social Work, Try This|0 Comments

A group of five women of color collaborate around a table with open notebooks and papers. One woman writes while others observe and discuss. Text overlay reads “Try This: Leading Strategic Planning with a Social Work Lens.” — Try this activity to see your social work skills through a strategic lens.

What would be possible if more social workers stepped into strategic planning?

Social workers are natural systems thinkers, collaborators, and process facilitators—exactly the kinds of people organizations need when it’s time to step back and plan for the future.

Yet many social workers don’t see themselves as candidates to lead strategic planning efforts. That role often feels reserved for consultants, executive leaders, or those with formal strategy training. But strategic planning is about understanding people, holding complexity, and guiding values-aligned decisions, as much as it is about frameworks and facilitation.

If you’ve ever supported a group through change, named a pattern that no one else could see, or translated community needs into action, then you already have the foundation to lead a strategic planning process.

This activity helps social workers explore their readiness to lead a strategic planning process at the organizational level—and positions them to claim that leadership with clarity and confidence.

Objective:

To help social workers recognize and articulate the strategic, facilitative, and relational skills they bring to leading an organizational strategic planning process.

This activity is ideal for:

Social workers in program design, implementation, or operations roles
Social workers considering leadership or consulting roles
Social workers interested in using their skills to shape organizational direction

What you’ll need:

45–60 minutes of uninterrupted time
Pen and paper, whiteboard, or digital workspace
Optional: a recent or upcoming strategic planning process in mind

The steps:

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9 Jul, 2025

Designing Programs and Services with a Social Work Lens

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2025-07-09T16:32:40-04:00July 9th, 2025|Categories: Public Health & Social Work|Tags: program design, Programs & Services, Social Work|0 Comments

An Asian woman wearing a white button-down shirt holds a pen and clipboard while thinking. A text overlay reads “Designing Programs and Services with a Social Work Lens.” — The next time someone asks, “Who designed this?”,—the answer could be you.

Social workers—especially those who have worked in case management, group facilitation, or crisis response—bring a nuanced and often underutilized lens to programs and services design.

In fact, it’s in these roles that social workers often notice how ineffective programs and services can be.

Trained to assess needs in real time, respond to complexity, and create plans of care that center dignity and context, social workers have the ability to design programs and services as much as we implement them.

Program and service design isn’t just for project managers, technical consultants, or evaluators. This post is a reminder (and reframe) for social workers who may not see themselves as program and service designers, but already have what it takes to design and lead thoughtful, inclusive, and responsive programming.

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2 Jul, 2025

Ask Nicole: Casework to Systems Change: A Path for Social Workers

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2025-07-09T16:33:59-04:00July 2nd, 2025|Categories: Public Health & Social Work|Tags: Ask Nicole, Social Work, Systems Change, Systems Thinking|0 Comments

Have a question you’d like featured? Let me know.

At its core, social work training prepares us to see the bigger picture.

For example, when you assess a client’s environment, family dynamics, access to resources, and systemic barriers, you’re engaging in systems thinking. You’re asking, What’s influencing this situation? How does this connect to other people, systems, or conditions?

In contrast, when you take that insight and work to redesign the system itself—whether through policy, program improvements, or advocacy—you’re engaging in systems change.

This month’s Ask Nicole highlights how micro social workers already to think in systems, and how those insights can guide their path from casework to systems change.

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6 Mar, 2024

Ask Nicole: The Role of Social Workers in Reproductive Justice

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2024-03-07T11:09:44-05:00March 6th, 2024|Categories: Public Health & Social Work|Tags: Ask Nicole, reproductive justice, Social Work|0 Comments

Have a question you’d like to be featured? Let me know,

March is Social Work Month, and the 2024 theme is “Empowering Social Workers!: Inspiring Action, Leading Change.”

If you’ve been reading my blog for a while, you’ll know that my passion area is Reproductive Justice, and how the framework looks through a social work lens.

Reproductive Justice and social work are very complimentary. As RJ is a community organizing model that centers community leadership and challenges structural inequities, the framework provides a holistic understanding of our circumstances, and how they help or hinder our sexual and reproductive decision making. Social work supports individual and collective capacity for social functioning, working to create societal conditions that support communities in need. Together, they acknowledge that we seldom make life decisions in a vacuum. Social, economic, racial, gender, and cultural dynamics impact what we have access to and how we make decisions to support our sexual and reproductive care.

Reproductive Justice stands at the intersection of social work practice and human rights. As social workers navigate our roles in advancing RJ, we’ll encounter multifaceted challenges and opportunities across micro, mezzo, and macro levels of practice. Consider these questions as you navigate your social work education and career to advance Reproductive Justice:

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1 Mar, 2023

Ask Nicole: What is a Public Health Social Worker?

By Nicole Clark, LMSW|2023-03-01T12:27:07-05:00March 1st, 2023|Categories: Public Health & Social Work|Tags: Ask Nicole, public health, Social Work|0 Comments

There are two things I know for sure about social work and public health:

One: Social work and public health are naturally complimentary fields, perfectly suited to advance community health and wellbeing.

Two: People are just as confused about what public health is as they are with social work.

A struggle with social work is, because the profession is so diverse, most have a narrow view of what social workers do. While most only associate social work with social services, social workers work in many different settings, including schools, hospitals and clinics mental health practices, veteran centers, child welfare agencies, the criminal justice system, corporations, academia, research and policy, and state, federal and local government.

Similar to social work, public health practitioners work in various settings like the one’s I’ve mentioned. Also similar to social work, the general public is unclear about what public health is, what practitioners do, and how public health adds value. This disconnect limits communities’ understanding of what’s required to do social work and public health work effectively.

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Objective:

This activity is ideal for:

What you’ll need:

The steps:

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