Our Story
Social Workers Without Borders was formed in March 2016 in response to the injustice faced by displaced people in Northern France and Greece. Social workers mobilised and went to Calais and to Leros, where they put their social work skills to use by delivering vicarious trauma training, building safe spaces and completing social work assessments to support unaccompanied young people’s applications to enter the UK.
Our experience of completing social work assessments for separated children in Northern Frame highlighted a huge need for this kind of expert evidence for immigration decisions. Social Workers Without Borders registered as a UK charity in 2017, and since then we have gone on to provide independent social work reports for people across a broad range of immigration and asylum matters.
It really was this emotional response to the injustice in Calais, this ‘moral outrage’ that fuelled us and built the momentum for the work we went on to do
What we are witnessing is not a refugee crisis, but a crisis of care
The collective professional voice emerging from organising as SWWB was an empowering chance to assert the necessarily political nature of a profession engaged with promoting social change on both the individual and systemic level