The Future Is Here - It Is Just Not Evenly Distributed. Lessons and Recommendations from the Social Work Health Futures Lab - a National Project of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

The future is a place that social work cares about and commits to with its vision and practice. Yet too often, the profession finds itself in a reactive mode to social changes rather than fully engaged as a co-creator of the future.

How are contemporary issues such as poverty, democracy, health and equity changing and evolving? Is social work as a profession embracing and seeking to understand grand shifts in central dimensions of practice such as the role of technology, or the role of climate change - not as optional practice interests but as fundamental shifts in the practice ecosystem? How do social workers deal with intensifying and rapidly appearing changes in the practice, policy and research ecosystem of the profession - particularly as they relate to the future of health, equity and well-being?

Over the last several years, a group of social workers and social work scholars have gathered in a national fellowship called the Social Work Health Futures Lab funded by the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to explore these and other questions, as well as to learn about and experiment with "foresight practice." Foresight practice is an action-oriented evolution of futures studies - involving a rigorous, transdisciplinary approach to the future. This approach is made up of global practice community that exists across the public and private sectors and through innumerable disciplines and focal areas - until recently - excluding social work.

The work of the SWHFL considered the utility and ethical viability of the theories and frameworks of foresight for social work. Finding an intellectual home in critical and participatory foresight with strong alliance with such foresight expressions as Afrofuturism, feminist futures, Queer futures and others - the group considered the political and constructed nature of the future, the role of imagination and power, and how foresight intersects with and yet is distinct from social work in numerous ways. Our work demonstrated that social work can simultaneously be enhanced by foresight with its practical and theoretical considerations of how to co-create the future we want more effectively - and enhance foresight itself with our unique value base and focus on social justice and equity.

Activities included obtaining foresight training, learning from futurists and foresight practitioners from around the world, experimenting with foresight tools applied to issues of focus regarding human rights, health and health equity futures, and producing a framework distinct to what we believe is a useful and necessary set of ideas to help guide the social work profession of the future based on our work. Collectively, we believe that critical foresight can and should be a core aspect of social work practice, education and research in the future - better preparing social workers in future generations to be more successful change agents and actors in a future that may look very different than the one that exists today.

This workshop will share evaluations, reflections and lessons learned from this effort as well as plans for the future of this work in the profession.