Welcome to School Social Work Network

A community for school social workers to connect, learn, and improve practice through collaboration.

About Us

This community is developed and maintained by the SSWN team and is only open to school mental health practitioners, teaching professors, and researchers.

We created the School Social Work Network to bring together school social work professionals in a way that’s focused, valuable, and––most importantly––all our own.

Our mission is to create an online Community of Practice (CoP) where we have collaborative dialogue about issues pertaining to school social work.

Communities of practice are groups of people who share a concern or a passion for something they do and learn how to do it better as they interact regularly 

We also seek to provide the community with opportunities, tools, and resources to form smaller Communities of Practice (either in-person or online) focused on areas that matter most to them.

What to Expect

We're aiming to make your experience here awesome. We want you to get five key things from the School Social Work Network:

  • Experience exclusive content and conversations you can’t find anywhere else. 

  • Connect with other professionals who share your interests, who live near you, who do the same things, or who care about the same topics.

  • Make better, more well-informed decisions about your practice.

  • Swap stories, experiences, and ideas around our shared mission.

  • Find a little inspiration, thought-provoking conversations, and expert perspective each and every day.

Community Rules

We’re doing something a bit different here with School Social Work Network. We need everyone’s help to keep this emerging community as valuable, authentic, and safe as possible. 

This means a few rules of the road:

Don’t Spam or Self-Promote. While we all love a little self-promotion (this is still the Internet after all!), for everyone to get the most out of School Social Work Network, please don’t post direct links to your products or services unless you've received approval to do so. Affiliate links are also not allowed. 

Give More Than You Take. What makes a community amazing is when members are more focused on helping each other, than on helping themselves. Be as helpful as possible and everyone benefits!

Share Stories and Experiences, Not Advice. Nothing builds a beautiful conversation faster than sharing your stories and experiences, and nothing shuts one down faster than just posting advice. If you’ve written the words, “you should…” hold up. On the other hand, if you find yourself writing, “In my experience…” keep going!

No "links only" posts. Please don't post with just a link to something, no context, and without a focus on starting a conversation (explain why you’re sharing it and what members can learn).

Troll Elsewhere. There are plenty of places you can spend your time today where trolling is going to get you a lot more attention. If you’re tempted to troll here, head on over to those platforms first and get it out of your system.