June 2022
Report from the Capacity Building Committee
June 2022
Chair: Darla Spence Coffey; Co-chair: In Young Han
Members: Angelina Yuen; Karene-Anne Nathaniel-DeCaires; Janestic Mwende Twikirize;
Zulkarnain A. Hatta; Tracy Omorogiuwa; Felicia Tuggle; Alexandra Mustafa; Fenghzhi,
Ma; Huamin Peng; Liu Meng, Jie Lei
Updates on the committee’s various initiatives:
I.

Regional Resource Centres
A. Before issuing a Request for Proposals to establish another Regional
Resource Centre, the Capacity Building Committee agreed at its
February meeting that focus group interviews with the existing RRCs
would be helpful as we move forward.
Angie Yuen, Zul Hatta, Felicia Tuggle and I each interviewed theleadership of the four regional resource centres: China (Darla), Oceana(Angie), Nordic Baltic (Felicia), and East Africa (Zul). We were guided
by the following questions:
1. What were the original motivations for applying to establish an RRC
in your region? How far do you think the present operation of theRRC is able to reach your intended goals?
2. What are the benefits that you have seen in being named an RRC?
3. What obstacles have you encountered?
4. In addition to the initial seed money provided by IASSW, how did
you manage to sustain the RRC with your own resources? How doyou intend to make the RRC sustainable in the long run?
5. Have you collaborated with other RRCs? (Would you be willing to?)a. If an RRC has collaborated with another RRC it might begood for us to know what the collaboration entitled and how
it came about. If the RRC has not collaborated it might begood to know if there are any realities that have madecollaboration challenging.
6. What support might IASSW provide in areas such as
tenure/promotion recommendations, making connections,
supporting them when they look for local and regional funding?
How might we make the work of the RRC more visible?
7. Do you have any suggestions on the criteria to be used forestablishing new RRC? Do they think that our present criteria areappropriate?

1June 2022
The interviews were extraordinarily helpful and insightful andrevealed the following broad themes:➔ Each of the RRCs have established a strong presence in their regionand activities aimed at bringing together the education, researchand practice communities have been quite successful.
➔ Institutional support of the RRCs has been critical forsustainability (and this varies among the four and over time).
➔ There is optimism about their ability to secure additional funding
through grants and/or contracts.
➔ The RRCs would like to have more opportunities to connect andcollaborate with each other.
➔ The Centre leaders would like IASSW to help raise the profile ofthe Centres.
➔ All believed that the current eligibility criteria for application iscorrect.
B. IASSW now has four Regional Resource Centres (RRC): China, Oceana,
Nordic Baltic, East Africa
1. The China Social Work Research Centre, a collaboration between
Peking and Hong Kong Polytechnic Universities, established in2016, is the longest-serving and most established of the IASSW
RRCs. The Centre worked with the IASSW Capacity Building
committee and leadership of the Vietnam Association for Social
Work Education to offer a 2-day workshop for Vietnamese Social
Work Educators in May 2022. The event focused on curriculum
development and featured colleagues from China, Japan,Singapore, Vietnam and the United States.
The China Centre is providing support for the implementation of aMemorandum of Understanding between IASSW and the Vietnam
Association for Vocational Education and Social Work Profession(VAVETSOW).
2. The Regional Resource Centre of Oceania, a collaboration between
Massey University, Te Wānanga o Aotearoa, The University ofWollongong, The University of the South Pacific, and Whitireia
New Zealand, was established in 2017.
3. The Nordic Baltic Regional Resource Centre was established inFall 2019. This RRC engages social work educators andpractitioners in the countries of North Western Europe (Finland,Sweden, Norway, Denmark, Iceland, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania,Poland, German, and Russia), as well as throughout the broader
Baltic and Nordic regions, including Kauno Technologijos
Universitetas (Lithuania), Mykolas Romeris University(Lithuania), Oslo Metropolitan University (Norway), Jagiellonian2June 2022
University (Poland), Malmö University (Sweden). The universities
involved include the State University St Petersburg (Russia),
Trondheim University (Norway), University of Iceland (Iceland),Vilnius University (Lithuania), University of Latvia (Latvia),
Vytautas Magnus University, (Lithuania), Gothenburg University(Sweden), Tallinn University (Estonia), University of Tartu(Estonia), Nordic Association of Social Workers, Talenta (Finland),FORSA, and the DGSA (Deutsche Gesellschaft für Soziale Arbeit:
German Association of Social Work).
4. The East Africa Centre was launched approximately one year
ago, led by the Makerere University Department of Social Workand Social Administration and aims to support the growth of thesocial work profession in the surrounding areas of Burundi, Kenya,Rwanda, Tanzania, and Uganda.
II.

Capacity Building Workshops
As stated above, the Capacity Building Committee worked with an internationalgroup of colleagues to offer a two-day workshop for social work educators inVietnam. As is our custom, the design and focus of the workshop was in responseto the request offered by the leadership in Vietnam. It was attended byapproximately 45 educators; we have heard from our colleagues in Vietnam that itwas very well-received.
The June IASSW Board meeting will be a fully hybrid meeting. The Capacity
Building Committee is working with our Brazilian host(s) to develop a miniworkshop that will be meaningful to our colleagues in Brazil.

Respectfully submitted on behalf of the Capacity Building Committee,Darla Spence Coffey, PhD, MSW
Chair3