Session: Ecosocial Work Practice from the Ground up: Exploring Social Worker Engagement with Climate, Disaster, and Environmental Justice (Society for Social Work and Research 30th Annual Conference Anniversary)

Ecosocial work is an approach within the profession that emphasizes the interdependence between human wellbeing and the health of the natural environment. The field of social work is increasingly embracing this perspective, acknowledging that climate change, environmental degradation, and disasters are not only ecological issues but also urgent social justice concerns.This shift is evident in developments such as the Council on Social Work Education's Curriculum Guide for Environmental Justice and the inclusion of Creating a Social Response to a Changing Environment as one of the Grand Challenges for Social Work.

Although the theoretical foundations of ecosocial work have been evolving for more than two decades, there remains a need to understand how these frameworks are being translated into everyday practice. Given this gap, important questions emerge: What does ecosocial work look like on the ground? How are social workers engaging or not engaging with environmental and climate justice in their day-to-day roles?

This symposium calls for closer attention to the practice realities of engaging with an ecosocial lens. We focus on ecosocial work practice from the ground to explore how it is interpreted, adapted, and enacted across diverse contexts, policies, and practices, highlighting both the challenges and successes that shape a growing and evolving vision for ecosocial work.

Paper 1 aims to identify social workers integrating the ecosocial approach into their practice and examines the strategies used for implementation. Through an online survey across three states in the U.S, the study reveals who engages in ecosocial work and seeks to inform social work organizations about practitioners' responses to environmental and climate crises. Paper 2 examines ecosocial work practice in rural areas, utilizing survey data from rural social workers across three states in the U.S. It addresses the environmental challenges they encounter and highlights the importance of climate and environmental issues in rural social work. Paper 3 explores how ecosocial work values are enacted in climate justice activism and how social work education supports this work. Through interviewing climate justice activists with a social work background in the Sunrise Movement, this study offers insights into what ecosocial work can look like in practice. Paper 4 examines the role of social workers in disaster preparedness. This study utilized a cross-sectional survey of social work professionals in four states to evaluate their overall levels of disaster preparedness and how they are integrated into disaster management systems. Paper 5 examines ways to integrate environmental justice with anti-racism and anti-oppression (ARAO). Using Constructivist Grounded Theory based on work with 17 ecosocial workers in practice, this study offers future guidance through the proposed Critical Ecosocial Framework.

Finally, the discussant will synthesize the five research presentations to uncover the common threads across the symposium papers that highlight various ecosocial work practices in action. Through these discussions, we aim to identify, as outlined in the title of the first paper, the "who" and "how" of ecosocial work across different settings, while also gaining insights from ecosocial workers to advance ecosocial work practice strategies.