As a social worker, you need to use your policy advocacy skills to ensure your clients receive the services they need. Although you may tend to think of policy advocacy skills as separate from your clinical social work skills, they are similar. Think of the advanced practice skills—reframing, educating, brokering, collaborating, and building trust and rapport, for example—that you would use in working with a client who was experiencing homelessness, aging, child sexual assault, or low wage earnings.

How could you apply advanced practice skills to policy advocacy? How will you use these practice skills to identify the policy and social problems that are impacting these families?

For this Discussion, you will review examples of social problems and use your practice skills to analyze the problems from the client perspective.

To prepare:

Read Chapter 7 of the Jansson text.
Review the “Policy Advocacy Challenge” sections assigned from the Jansson text this week.
Select one of the Policy Advocacy Challenge examples to use for your Discussion. Use your experiences as a practicing social worker and/or your academic interests to inform your selection.

Post a short description of the social problem from the Policy Advocacy Challenge you selected from the Jansson text. Then address the following:

Who is defining the problem?
What values are reflected in this definition of the problem?
What is being omitted in this definition?
Be sure to support your post with specific references to this week’s resources. If you are using additional articles, be sure to provide full APA-formatted citations for your references.