The Conditions That Make Advocacy Safe
Churchill Fellow 2025. What organisations build deliberately, and what happens when they don't.
In my last piece, I wrote about why social workers need to advocate, for their teams, for their clients, and for themselves. This one is about a harder question: what happens to the people who do, when their organisation and their system haven't actually made it safe?
Across my Churchill Fellowship interviews, I found real examples of both. What organisations do, deliberately, to protect advocacy. And what happens when they don't.
What it looks like when it isn't safe
In Minneapolis, Beth Ringer, Executive Director of the Minnesota Social Service Association, described something I hadn't expected to hear:
"It is highly taboo to advocate for human service professionals, even at a blue state legislature." — Beth Ringer
Legislators have accused her directly of hating people with disabilities because she was advocating for case managers to be paid fairly. This happens on both sides of politics, not one. Her colleague, Shereen Reda, Director of Professional Development at MSSA, described the cultural mirror of that same dynamic inside organisations:
"There is a culture that celebrates martyrdom. The person who sacrifices their weekend gets the lifetime achievement award." — Shereen Reda
It wasn't a hypothetical. A lifetime achievement award had genuinely been given to someone in recognition of that self-sacrifice, celebrated by their peers for it, not questioned as a sign something in the system needed to change. Across the wider sector, some macro practice social workers have had to actively make the case that their systems-level, advocacy-focused work counts as social work at all, in one instance, a practitioner needed to argue their case directly to a state licensing board before it would recognise the hours toward their own licensure.
Three different failure points, at three different levels: the political system treating professional advocacy as evidence of not caring about the people it serves, an organisational culture that rewards sacrifice instead of protecting people from needing to make it, and a regulatory definition of the work itself too narrow to recognise advocacy as part of the job. None of these are individual failings. They're conditions. And conditions are something an organisation actually has the power to change.
What deliberate protection actually looks like
A few structural examples came up across the fellowship that do the opposite, building advocacy into the system so it doesn't depend on individual courage alone.
Statutory protection for developmental infrastructure. Minnesota's Child Welfare Training Academy exists because it's written into law, not held at anyone's discretion. It followed a 2014–15 child death review task force that produced ninety-three recommendations, many about training, later turned into legislation naming the University of Minnesota and the state's Department of Human Services as equal partners, neither able to remove the other without the law itself changing. New-worker training, new-supervisor training, and ongoing professional development are now statutory requirements, not line items a budget cut can quietly erase.
Worth being precise about who this protects, though. It's specific to Minnesota's child welfare workforce, not the broader human services membership Beth and Shereen represent at MSSA, spanning aging, disability, mental health, and chemical health as well as child welfare. Even within child welfare, fewer than half of Minnesota's workers hold a social work degree, so this is a workforce-wide protection, not a profession-specific one. For MSSA's members more broadly, no comparable statutory protection exists, part of why the political taboo Beth described lands as hard as it does: no law stands between her members and that risk, only individuals willing to raise it anyway.
Shared accountability by design. Sweden takes a related but different approach again: decisions to place a child in out-of-home care require sign-off from the municipal welfare board, made up of locally elected politicians, not a practitioner's or manager's decision alone. If the family disagrees, the case goes to court rather than being settled by the agency by itself. That two-layer design means responsibility for the hardest calls is already shared upward and outward by structure, not something a practitioner has to personally fight to escalate.
Genuinely open access to the top. Monica Hynds, Director of Innovation and Development, at Barnardos in Dublin, described a culture where staff can call the CEO directly with a concern, no permission required to escalate.
This one costs nothing structurally. It requires a senior leader willing to actually answer, and a culture where doing so isn't treated as going over someone's head.
Protecting the code, not requiring people to justify it
What happens when professional ethics don't align with organisational direction? That's the hard question sitting underneath everything in this piece. There's a subtler version of the same question worth asking directly too, and it applies just as much to organisations that employ social workers but where social workers aren't the majority of the workforce, arguably more so: is your organisation treating the code of ethics, and the values underneath it, as something staff have to defend and justify case by case, or as something the organisation itself actively protects? Often that's exactly where the tension lies, a code that the dominant professional culture around you doesn't share isn't automatically hostile to it, but it does mean nobody else in the room is going to protect it on your behalf. That has to be a deliberate choice, not an assumption.
The research on this, mostly from healthcare and nursing rather than social work specifically, but the underlying mechanism transfers directly, points the same way as everything above. A longitudinal study of Canadian healthcare workers found that leadership's effect on reducing moral distress wasn't direct at all. It was fully explained by whether the organisation had built genuine workplace supports and what researchers call an ethical climate, the shared, felt sense that ethical concerns will actually be taken seriously rather than managed away. Good leadership on its own didn't protect people, the structures it built did.
A related body of work on moral distress support has moved past individual coping techniques toward structural tools: guided reflection processes that help a distressed practitioner identify concrete next steps, and then, deliberately, widen the conversation from what one person can personally live with to what the institution itself needs to change. That shift, from an individual absorbing the strain to an organisation examining its own culture, is the whole difference between protecting a code of ethics and quietly making staff justify it alone.
Two questions worth considering, asking yourself directly, not your team. Because a workforce that's actually afraid to speak up won't tell you that honestly either.
Can you name, specifically, the last time someone on your team raised a hard concern, and what actually happened to them afterwards? Not what you hope happened. What you know happened, in enough detail that you could describe it to someone else.
If someone raised that exact same concern again today, would the outcome be different this time, and what's your actual evidence for that, beyond your own good intentions?
What this means in practice
Some of this doesn’t require a large budget. It requires a decision about where responsibility should sit, and whether raising a concern is treated as a risk to the person raising it or a normal, expected part of the work.
What has your organisation done, deliberately or by accident, that made advocacy feel safe or unsafe? I'd like to hear it.