Elevating social work with National Professional Social Work Month
March is National Professional Social Work Month, and this year’s theme is “Elevate Social Work!” The National Association for Social Workers (NASW) has released a set of resources to highlight the work performed by more than 680,000 social workers across the country.
Social workers are employed in schools, hospitals, mental health facilities, veterans’ centers, and other governmental and private facilities. According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, 110,000 social workers are expected to enter the profession in the next seven years. This year, the NASW plans to remind the public and legislators about the important role social workers play at all levels of society while also pointing out that social workers’ salaries tend to lag behind those of other helping professions.
NASW released an infographic that highlights some of these salary disparities. For example, the median annual wage for social workers is $47,980, compared to $70,000 for registered nurses and $59,170 for high school teachers. Salaries of social workers employed by hospitals—whether state, local, or private—tend to be highest across all sectors that employ social workers with a median annual wage of $58,490. Wages are lowest for social workers employed in individual and family services, where the median annual wage is $40,800.
The NASW is also using this month to emphasize the role that social workers play in the field of mental health. Social workers are the largest group of mental health service providers in the U.S., and the Veterans Administration is the largest employer of social workers with a master’s degree in the country.
In addition, the NASW is highlighting work done by the 2018 Social Worker of the Year Kimber Nicoletti-Martinez, who founded Multicultural Efforts to End Sexual Assault (MESA), an organization that mobilizes farm workers and other low-wage immigrant communities to prevent child sexual abuse. MESA’s efforts are currently focused on Indiana, California, Pennsylvania, and Arizona.