The Alignment Gap

About Jody

Jody Bell is a social work leadership advisor, researcher and Churchill Fellow 2025. She has spent 35 years working at the intersection of social work and organisational leadership, as a frontline practitioner, team leader, senior executive in government, academic and advisor. Her Churchill Fellowship took her across nine countries to research what the world’s best leadership conditions look like for social workers. Being Your Potential is her practice, grounded in that research and in 35 years of experience inside human services systems.

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Who This Is For

This webinar is for anyone who cares about social work leadership:

• Aspiring and early-career social work leaders

• Experienced social work practitioners and managers

• Employers of social workers: NFPs, health and community organisations, and government agencies

• Social work educators and researchers

• Professional bodies and associations

• Policy makers and government representatives

• International colleagues from the Churchill Fellowship network across nine countries

What the webinar covers:

Social workers are among the most in-demand professionals in human services, nationally and internationally. And yet capable, values-driven practitioners are leaving leadership at rates that workforce strategies have not kept pace with.

This webinar presents the findings from Jody Bell’s 2025 Churchill Fellowship research: what the world’s best leadership conditions look like for social workers, drawn from nine countries of fieldwork with leaders, researchers, organisations and professional bodies at the forefront of this work.

The findings challenge some of the assumptions that underpin how we recruit, develop and retain social work leaders. They also point clearly to what changes when the conditions are right.

This is not a webinar about resilience or self-care. It is about the structural conditions that allow social workers to stay themselves in leadership, and what that means for practice quality, workforce sustainability and the people our profession exists to serve.

Format and Availability

Duration: one hour

Format: presentation followed by live Q&A

The webinar will be recorded and publicly available after the event. A recording link will be sent to all registrants.

Following the webinar, registrants will have the opportunity to stay connected with what comes next, including a global community of practice bringing together social work leaders, researchers, educators, professional bodies and organisations from the international network.