Selfie

We, Unity, are the social work service users and carers group at the University of Stirling in Scotland. The group was established in 2005 and is made up of service users, carers, staff from partner agencies, student representatives and university teaching staff. We are involved in a range of teaching sessions on the qualifying social work programmes, and also with other activities like open days and developing case studies for use in selection. We have a newsletter and a website: http://unity.wordpress.stir.ac.uk/

We are developing our involvement in teaching student nurses and we are also involved in:

Events run by Stirling Students’ Union, for instance to mark Mental Health Awareness Week;

The Scottish Inter-University Service User and Carer Network: https://bettersocialwork.wordpress.com/

National events like conferences and research projects.

 

We chose Selfie (of some of the members of the group) because …

… social work is about people and it is about involvement. We took the photograph at one of our meetings, and not everyone was there. This made us think about the limitations of a ‘snapshot’ to represent who we are and what we do. We think that it is important for Unity, and also for social work, to recognise the missing voices and try to draw these in.