Social workers / Relationships, integration and the prefix ‘SOCIO’

The speech by Silvia Bertelli, municipal social worker, at the FP Cgil Lombardia assembly on 18 October

23 ott. 2024 – Silvia Bertelli works at the Municipality of Brescia as a social workerhas been holding an organizational position for a few years and is responsible for a local social service. For six years before that, he worked in healthcare and it was “a very educational but very difficult experience”.

All’assembly organized by FP Cgil Lombardia on 18 October last with the social assistance workers he read his speech with the intention of offering it as “inspiration, reflection, also on the theme of integration that we have at various levels, because we are in different spaces, in different services” .

Here is the text:

“My present I’m a ‘PARTNER’yes I am that widely used prefix. I always come first but being a single prefix and not a word, I count for little, they forget about me and some don’t even know what it means.

I’ll give you some examples: we all know words like socio-cultural, socio-political, socio-economic and above all the term SOCIAL-HEALTH.

I am continually in every context but the extended word always surpasses me and I struggle to make myself heard, to make myself understood and to be recognized as a word, as important and fundamental as the others…

Every day I look in the mirror and think that I’m a bit everywhere, because basically I deal with RELATIONSHIPS: everything is relationship, everything is related and each of us, even while working, is related.

But there is a place where I am not just a prefix but I am a word, and it is SOCIAL SERVICE, there I am finally there in one piece and I am able to rediscover my specificity and my importance. But it doesn’t last long, because I work with people, all of us, we are not little pieces, but we are a single, complex thing, made up of many parts, and these parts condition each other. So soon, as soon as I start to enter into the stories of the people who attend social services, as soon as I encounter their looks, their fragility, their anger and their strength, I return to being a simple prefix.

I am destined to be a prefix, because in people’s eyes there are economic problems, in stories I find psychological difficulties, because frailties are often accompanied by health problems… In short, I cannot be alone, my purpose in this world is to succeed to bring out the importance and meaning I have in people’s lives but at the same time I have the burden and honor of keeping all the pieces together. Yes, it’s hard, difficult work but when it succeeds it’s the best job in the world.

As you will all have understood, I’m a social worker and I work in a social service. Our role can do integration, it can succeed in the attempt to ‘put the pieces together’. Our professional knowledge, too often undervalued, is what puts the relationship at the centre, the relationship in itself is integration, because it takes into account various aspects of the person, the life context and the social context and already in taking care of we integrate relationships.

So I ask all of you and our union to see this professionalism of ours as an instrument of union, of understanding other visions and other professionalisms and therefore I ask us to put ourselves at the center of the integrated system, because only if we put this “MEMBER” PREFIX at the center can we re-tie the threads”.

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