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International Association of Schools of Social Work
President's Report ( January – June 2023 )for Hybrid ( Porto , Portugal and on line) Board Meeting
Dear colleagues,Many interesting activities have taken place during this semester.
I would like to highlight the most important.
On January 19th and 20th we had Board Meeting at the Department of Social Work, Nelson
Mandela University Gqeberha Eastern Cape, South Africa and it was organized by Annaline
Keet with the help from ASAWSEI and ASSWA colleagues. It was hybrid board meeting, socolleagues who could not travel joined the meeting online.

Before the board meeting an international seminar on THE ROLE OF SOCIAL WORK INREALISING THE SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT GOALS was organized by IASSW, ASAWSEIASSWA and NELSON MANDELA UNIVERSITY/JOHANNESBURG UNIVERSITY.
IASSW is thankful to each one who was helpful in making both events successful.
After the Board meeting in Port Elizabeth, Dr. Varoshini Nadesan (University of Johannesburgand former President of ASASWEI) has organised for the IASSW President to visit various socialwork schools in Gauteng. It was an honour for the heads of the Departments of Social Workand members of staff to meet with Professor Annamarie Campanini during her two day visit tothe Gauteng province. During the visits IASSW President, presented the vision and activities ofIASSW and inviting all schools to actively participate in the IASSW activities. The visit wasextremely well received as it was the first engagement for many South African social work
educators with our international president and generated insightful questions about the workof the IASSW. Thank you to Professor Annamaria Campanini for making herself available toshare her time in South Africa.
The two day visit consisted of informal information-sharing meetings with schools of social
work across Johannesburg and Pretoria. Many thanks to the schools for their warm hospitality.

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3As we have announced in the past report, IASSW has convened a Task Force of thought
leaders to develop ways to support the adoption of the standards as a framework for social
work education across the globe.
Finally it has been possible the 3rd of May to sign the agreement with Department of AppliedSocial Sciences (APSS) represented by prof. Eric Chui for a partnership of three years insupporting IASWW to develop, for free, an online learning platform on the IASSW Global
Standards for Social Work Education and Training. Together with Varoshini Nadesan we havevisited the technical facilities and discuss with the team how to implement the program.
I would like to thank especially our past president Angie Yuen and current IASSW ambassador
for Asia Pacific Region for her continuous support that has been really useful to realise thiscooperation.

A second important event took place in Nanjing, the 7th pf May where I attended the opening
ceremony of the “International Perspective & Chinese Practice: International Symposium on
MSW Education in the New Era of China & Launching Ceremony of the Three-Year MSW
Education Capacity Building Initiative” organized by the China Association of Social Work
Education (CASWE) and the National MSW Teaching Advisory Committee in collaboration
with IASSW. In the coming three years, IASSW will provide peer review support to CASWE toevaluate the MSW programmes in Mainland China using the “Global Standards for Social Work
Education and Training 2020” as a reference, but emphasizing on the importance ofcontextualization. The conference was attended by more than 150 social work education
leaders and directors of MSW programmes in Mainland China, with more than 6,000 views ofthe conference online.
So now we are starting to plan the activities for realizing this very important and significant
initiative.

4We received a request from the Inter-University Council for East Africa to support the projectof development of Benchmarks and quality Standards in Social Work and Social
Administration Education for the Higher Learning Institutions in East Africa. We have had adiscussion with prof. Alexis and we have appointed prof. Janestic Twikirize, who was yet
identified as an expert to participate in the process by IUCEA, as representative ofour Association. I promised to send a video for the next meeting in July to introduce IASSWand the Global Standards. We will receive a proposal of MOU to sign for developing a futurecooperation.
We have continued the webinars in conjunction with the different UN world days, butfollowing the Memorandum of Understanding signed in March with the association Power Us,
we have also recorded webinars to spread the ideas of the importance of involving andcooperating with representatives of service users in our education and research. All videos
are available at (1079) IASSW Communications - YouTube. I invite you all to look and use
this material in your courses.
Thanks to the input of a Chilean colleague, we have created a task force to discuss and preparea document on clinical social work. The task force was chaired by Dixon Sookrai (University ofBritish Columbia, Canada) and Paola Grandon (Instituto Chileno de Trabajo Social Clínico,Chile), Mariusz Granosik (University of Lodz, Poland), Chaime Marcuello (University ofZaragoza, Spain), Orit Nuttman-Shwartz (Sapir College, Israel), Christos Panagiotopoulos(University of Nicosia, Greece), David Rose (University of Melbourne, Australia),Adrian van
Breda (University of Johannesburg, South Africa). The document is ready and was sent to all
the Board members. I hope that we can approve it during the next board meeting in Porto.
Last initiative is the revamping of the website. We have now a new agency Neural who istaking care of the project, together with Jenny. I really hope that this new website will attract
more members and will enhance the visibility of our association.

5During these months we have had a lot of meetings with Officers, with Rashmi and Jenny,
with the website masters and with some members of the Board to discuss different activities
and problems connected with our association.
Other activities
I am sharing some highlights of my participation to many different initiatives during the past
six months:
January
11/13 Welcome and key note on “Promoting health” at the conference “Social work promotinghealth” Rajajiri College India
24 Visit different Universities (UJ, Wits, SACAP)in Johannesburg and meeting with deans andcolleagues
25 Visit to UNISA and Pretoria University and meeting with deans and colleaguesFebruary
2 meeting with Power Us
6 meeting with Sage
7 and 17 Tripartite meetingMarch
7 Speech for celebrating 25 years of Internationalisation at Rajagiri College (on line)
Presentation for WSWD2023 in English, Spanish, French and Italian
9 Speech on “Respecting diversity” for the Iran conference on “Social work and social diversity “(on line)
15 Welcome on line for the WSWD ONU Ginevra
21 Speech on IASSW at the “Stati generali”- 30 years of the National Council of Social Work inRome

6April
3 Welcome on line for the WSWD ONU New York
10 Opening academic year of master in clinical social work at Valparaiso University (on line)
12 Welcome message at the opening of ESWRA conference in Milano

21 Presentation on “El contexto y el papel profesional del trabajo social internacional. Algunospaíses en comparación” Universidad de las Islas Baleares

7May
3 Presentation of IASSW and Global Standard at the PoliYU in Hong Kong, followed by the signingof the agreement of cooperation.
International Scholar Talk Series on Global Standard of social work education and training
5 I visited the three schools of social work (City University of Macao, University of Saint Joseph,Macao Polytechnic University) in Macao meeting their leaders and academic staff
6 I delivered a lecture on “The role of IASSW in promoting excellence in social work
education: Challenges and opportunities in the contemporary global situation" with theparticipation of members of the Professional Council of Social Workers, and scholars fromdifferent Universities
8 Speech at the opening ceremony of the “International Perspective & Chinese Practice:
International Symposium on MSW Education in the New Era of China & Launching Ceremonyof the Three-Year MSW Education Capacity Building Initiative” at Nanjing University ofScience and Technology
Lecture at the Nanjing University of Posts and Telecommunications on Global Standards forSocial work education and training
9 Presentation at the Nanjing University of Science and Technology on Global Standards forSocial work education and training in the context of the conference.
I am not including pictures of each travel/events in the report. All has been posted by Rashmi
Pandey on IASSW social media platforms (Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram and Twitter) Someof them is also available on IASSW website. If you are not yet following IASSW Social Media,please do that. It will be helpful in increasing the visibility of IASSW.
I look forward to your feedback on my report and I hope that in June Board Meeting we will
have fruitful discussion while meeting face-to-face with some of you.
Respectfully submitted

Prof. Annamaria Campanini
President, International Association of Schools of Social Work (IASSW)