Grand Challenges for Social Work Roundtable: Introduction to the Social Work Grand Challenges Futures Project (2025-2026)

The Social Work Grand Challenges Futures Project (GC Futures) brings together two national innovations—The Grand Challenges for Social Work and The Social Work Futures Project—to help participants anticipate the future of Grand Challenges through the powerful lenses of “anticipatory social work,� futures thinking, and foresight-based practice. Foresight practice is a rapidly emerging approach to social change that relies heavily on imagination, transdisciplinary and cross-sector exchange, deeply rooted community engagement, constant power analysis (who gets to define our futures, and universally accessible, field-tested tools. When anchored in a social work values-centered framework, foresight methods are vitally apropos to reenvisioning social work’s grand challenges in times of dramatic upheaval, uncertainty, and transformation. GC Futures aims to build the future-readiness of grand challenge leaders, enabling them to: • Better anticipate future turbulence, uncertainty, and opportunity in the social work research and practice ecosystem, • Develop greater capability to co-navigate uncertainty and non-linear challenges for the future of the Social Work Grand Challenges—with agency, hope, and imagination, • Apply the anticipatory social work framework to broaden our understanding of individual Grand Challenge topic areas and the Grand Challenges as a whole, and • Build social work capacity and community for futures thinking and foresight practice. One presenter will kick off this roundtable session with an overview of the aims and methods of the GC Futures Project. Presenters from different grand challenge areas will then discuss their team’s application of foresight tools to their grand challenge topic areas. Our presenters will highlight points of articulation across topic areas and identify potential new grand challenge trajectories. The goal of this session is to stimulate discussion and understanding of the potential place of foresight methods in advancing the social work grand challenges and social change.