The Council on Social Work Education (CSWE) is the accrediting body for social work education in the United States. Through their 9 competencies, they describe knowledge and skills that every student in an accredited program must gain through their education.  As more attention is being brought to the killing of Black Americans through violent police forces and the intentional neglect of Native Americans suffering from COVID-19, CSWE must be explicit in educational goals. Right now, they are revising the competencies for 2022 and there is no mention of "anti-racist" and "decolonization" within the competencies. We are calling on CSWE to specifically add this wording to Competency 2 which addresses diversity. Currently, this competency reads as follows:

"Social workers understand how diversity and difference characterize and shape the human experience and are critical to the formation of identity. The dimensions of diversity are understood as the intersectionality of multiple factors including but not limited to age, class, color, culture, disability and ability, ethnicity, gender, gender identity, and expression, immigration status, marital status, political ideology, race, religion/spirituality, sex, sexual orientation, and tribal sovereign status. Social workers understand that, as a consequence of difference, a person’s life experiences may include oppression, poverty, marginalization, and alienation as well
as privilege, power, and acclaim. Social workers also understand the forms and mechanisms of oppression and discrimination and recognize the extent to which a culture’s structures and values, including social, economic, political, and cultural exclusions, may oppress, marginalize, alienate, or create privilege and power.

Social workers:
• apply and communicate understanding of the importance of diversity and difference in shaping life experiences in practice at the micro, mezzo, and macro levels;
• present themselves as learners and engage clients and constituencies as experts of their own experiences; and
• apply self-awareness and self-regulation to manage the influence of personal biases and values in working with diverse clients
and constituencies"

This petition was started after seeing work done by MSW student organizers at the University of Michigan and seeking to amplify their goal