The School of Social Work runs a course where trained social workers work to create project ideas together with persons who have been users of social work. “We hope that the trained social worker students and persons from the exposed groups together will find the courage to develop the social work,” says Cecilia Heule who’s the teacher in charge.
The clock is close to a quarter past nine and in the lecture hall at the School of Social Work the students arrive one by one. Almost two weeks ago all the participants were on a two-day-conference in Tranås to get to know each other and brainstormed the ideas to be presented today. Cecilia Heule gets up to introduce the persons sitting in the front row of the hall. They are representatives from different user organizations and from the social services in the municipalities of Malmö and Lund.
Six students line up in front of the white board and tell us about their idea: An activity house in which exercise, fare and health will complement the addiction aid. Research shows that users respond better to treatments if they exercise on a regular basis, but the group emphasize that exercise still is an overlooked factor in social work.
The panel like what they hear but wonder at the same time: In what way do the students plan to carry out the idea? How would it be financed? What downsides are there if the focus is too much on fare and exercise, especially if the users are persons with eating disorders?
The course is called “the Mobilization course” and is the only course of its kind in Sweden, integrating trained social worker students from different organizations of users and interest. As the course is outlined as a commissioned education on the introduction level it is possible for persons with no university qualification to still be admitted.
One of the students is Catrin Albrektsson. She is 46 years old and the mobilization course will give her the first university grades ever. For four years she was homeless before she last year got a lease in Helsingborg, thanks to the project Housing First. “I’ve had addiction problems since I was a teenager and was homeless now and then. But today I have been free of drugs for one and a half year,” she tells us in the break between the presentations.
The interest in fare and exercise comes from her own experience. “As a homeless person you live ‘from-hand-to-mouth’ leading to obesity. It becomes like an extra handicap on top of everything else and the self-esteem suffers. It is a feeling of not being worth living a normal life. I myself have succeeded in losing many pounds of weight. To exercise and eat the right things have been important steps of becoming free of drugs,” she says.
Catrin Albrektsson enjoys studying at the university with her classmates. “The trained social worker students have a lot of knowledge and are extremely experienced and motivated,“ she thinks. At the same time it has often clearly shown that their life experiences are very different from hers. “They haven’t spent time on the phone to reach the social service, they haven’t even seen a form for a recipient of social benefits. It seems that the course misses some important practical aspects. To study one exchange semester at a foreign university is probably nice, but how much do the students know about the reality at home?
Her dream is to work with the same kind of project she just presented, and in which she will have a chance to help persons in the same situation as she has been. “I don’t want to be a slave at a job with no meaning just to get paid. I would like to make a difference for other people and this course gives me the tools to reach this goal,” she says.
Moa Kullén and Kim Book are studying their last semester at the social worker’s program and have chosen the mobilization course as an elective course. They think the course contributes with valuable and practical angels of incidence. “To study together with people who are not only engaged in different organizations, but maybe also relatives themselves or have lived in an exposed position in different ways, gives me totally new perspectives on what I’ve studied on the course,” Moa Kullén says.
“Also the course plan is different from the rest of the courses on the program,” Kim Book says. At the beginning of the course every participant had to present themselves, their previous experience of social work and why they had applied. “Despite the fact that I had studied with my classmates for more than three years it was like I learned to know them a second time during the presentations. Everyone was intimately and very open about themselves,” he says. Both of them agree with the criticism from Catrin Albrektsson. They had willingly accepted more practical elements in the course. Although they don’t think that the mobilization course should be an obligatory part of the trained social worker’s program.
“This is a difficult act of balancing. As the course is now elective, people apply if they have a genuine engagement to run different projects within social work. If everyone from the trained social workers program studied this course there is a risk the engagement would be diluted,” says Moa Kullén.
But then what? How many of these projects will continue in this form or another? Cecilia Heule tells us that several projects have been financed by the Swedish Inheritance Fund Commission while others have been part of different municipalities’ operations.
“For instance, right now around twenty different social projects are carried out in Malmö within an umbrella project called User Participation and many of these projects have began as ideas at our course,” she says. The break is over and again everyone gathers in the lecture hall. There is Henrik, who doesn’t want to be photographed nor give his last name. Earlier during the break he told us that he is a sober alcoholic. He received his trained social workers exam in May this year. “I studied this course mostly because it was fun,” he says. The next group gets up and starts approaching the white board. “And then I like the university environment too much,” he says and smiles.
Text: Julius Viktorsson
Illustration: Malin Johannesson
Photo: Jens Hansen
Translation: Lars Jansson
