Happy World Social Work Day from a decade post-MSW
Happy World Social Work Day! It is always poignant to me that it comes right at the Spring Equinox, a time for growth, progress, and change.
I’m Artie Hartsell. I use they/them pronouns, and I have undergrad (2012) and graduate (2013) degrees in social work from UNCC. My undergraduate focus was with LGBTQ+ youth and families, and as a graduate student, I worked primarily on health outcomes for trans youth, with a capstone on harm reduction. I am passionate about educating about the impacts of and addressing the root causes of minority stress amongst LGBTQ+ people, especially those who also exist at the intersections of other marginalizations, such as race and class.
I grew up in North Carolina, steeped in the Baptist tradition, and far from any conversation about what LGBTQ+ inclusion meant. But the more I stepped forward, the more it became my life’s calling. At the same time, I learned that the social work code of ethics was identical to my own, and that the field came naturally to me while always keeping me wide-eyed and hungry for words to describe the experiences I was noticing around me.
I was fortunate to do a field placement at an LGBTQ+ youth organization, where I did supportive counseling, group facilitation, resource management, housing and crisis support, and volunteer supervision. I also was able to work with schools and other organizations who served youth, providing education and training on serving our population.
While I always had my heart on macro work, I started in case management, like many of us do, working in foster care where I then moved to quality assurance and supervision for case managers. I was able to bring LGBTQ+ competency to some of that work and educate my colleagues, but there was still so much to do. Because of my experience with harm reduction, I moved on to medical case management for adults with HIV. While that work was ultimately to help clients stay “compliant” on their HIV medications, the only way to do that was to constantly chase down scarce public resources of food, hygiene products, and shelter. For trans clients who were using substances and seeking treatment, finding programs where they would be placed with their gender was next to impossible. In 2015, I found ONE program for a client, and it was across the country. I was thankful for the Housing First model that had been implemented in Charlotte with Moore Place, but we had a long ways to go to keep people housed. We still do. I found case management for 60+ adults who did not have basic needs to be rewarding, exhausting, and frustrating. How could we hold clients to standards people who have access to basic needs struggle to keep? I felt like I was running on a hamster wheel, keeping people alive for a day — and that is vital and the impact can not be overstated — but I needed to be part of filling the systematic gaps that kept them in these situations.
In the background of that work, I spent my volunteer time doing political LGBTQ+ work, from local candidate endorsement processes (creating questionnaires, interviews, and the communications materials) and putting together fundraising efforts from cold calling to high-dollar events. I served on a task force to bring PrEP access to Mecklenburg County for those who could not otherwise afford it, and I worked on Charlotte’s nondiscrimination ordinance which passed in 2016 and to which the North Carolina General Assembly responded with House Bill 2. I was the education chair for that work, bringing in organizations, faith communities, and businesses. I also created a survey for the community of experiences with discrimination that could be used for reference in our fight. After House Bill 2, I participated in direct actions including disruptive protests and I even dropped a banner over the balcony at the North Carolina General Assembly while the Senate was in session!
In 2016, on the day we finally passed the ordinance, I interviewed for a managing organizer position at Democracy North Carolina, where I then spent three years on voting rights and democracy issues, using traditional organizing tactics as well as monitoring boards of elections, analyzing campaign finance reports, and fighting for voting access. I While I always wove racial justice into my work, this is where I gained a deeper understanding of the creation of whiteness and the mechanisms of white supremacy in our society.
In 2019, I joined the staff of Equality North Carolina as Lead Organizer. In 2021, I was promoted to Advocacy and Elections Strategist and then, in 2022, to Director of Strategic Initatives. My roles include helping direct advocacy efforts, project management, strategic planning, and keeping our organization focused on our mission in a time where we could be pulled in a million directions. I also lead our faith organizing, maintain relationships and education for allied elected officials, and create and present our external trainings to businesses, municipal staff, and more. I monitor LGBTQ+ movement, attacks, cultural change, and legislation locally all the way to the federal level. I’ve planned advocacy days and press events and participated in legislative advocacy consistently in the North Carolina General Assembly as well as in the United States Congress.
The work at Equality North Carolina is a dream come true. I first interacted with the organization at a 2008 advocacy day when my friend — current NCDHHS Secretary Kody Kinsley — gently pushed me into my senator’s office to advocate for the School Violence Prevention Act. Today, I help plan those advocacy days.
Social work is a complex field with a lot of things to work out, including the ways parts of our field — and paraprofessionals using our title — uphold harmful systems and act as street-level beaurocrats and an arm of police, when we could be leaning into transformative justice to create a better world. I consider myself part of the critical social work tradition. There are so many of us fighting for the right things.
I graduated in 2013 with my MSW, and my education - combined with my personal background and passions — has provided me with the ability to work in so many different spaces from case management to community work to systems change. I have had the privilege of serving as a field instructor for the entirety of that time, and it has been one of the highlights for me. A solid social work education can lead futur social workers to have impacts we can never fully conceptualize. Our set of skills can be used to understand and address issues as close to home as you can get — literally in the home and also internally within our organizations — and as broad as you can get. We touch so many lives, whether we work with clients through micro interventions or work to change the roots of their problems at the macro level.
The next phase of my career is coming up, and I’m still determining where I’ll end up. Meanwhile, I get so much enjoyment from my consulting and education work at Pride Education Services. I also use my religious background and personal experiences within the church and with church politics, to meet them where they are and walk with them on the journey towards inclusion, through the Project Embodied Welcome (PEW) program. I’m currently a part time seminary student to deepen that work.
I grew up in circumstances that didn’t always make me excited about the future, but today I am excited about what’s next, and the field of social work is the scaffolding that has made that true.
