Time: 11:00 – 13:30 ET
About this event
We at PFAN, IPAN, and SWAG are pleased to announce our joint webinar on language and why it matters from a parental and professional point of view. We have some great speakers:
- Tammy Mayes is a warrior mother of four children with disabilities who spends each and every day not only fighting for her children's rights but empowering other parents to fight for their children. She is the Co-Chair of both PFAN and SWAG, sits on the IPAN board of directors, and has fought poverty as an ATD activist for nearly two decades. She is a published author and has spent the last year campaigning for language reform in social work alongside Jason. You can read her most recent article in BASWA here and watch find her language campaign videos on YouTube.
Tammy is passionate and determined that the voices of lived experience can no long be silenced and that people must change the way they speak about people if we are to change systems of injustice and oppression.
- Simon Haworth is a lecturer within the Department of Social Work and Social Care at the University of Birmingham. He is involved with a variety of research projects. This includes on child neglect, leadership in social work and fatherhood. Simon is a member of PFAN and the Children and Families Truth Commission.
- Dorothy Roberts is an award-winning author and expert on the interplay of gender, race, and class in legal issues concerning reproduction, bioethics, and child welfare. Her latest book, TORN APART: How the child welfare system destroys black families—and how abolition can build a safer world, was released by Basic Books on April 5, 2022.
- Richard Wexler is Executive Director of NCCPR. His interest in child welfare grew out of 19 years of work as a reporter for newspapers, public radio and public television. During that time, he won more than two dozen awards, many of them for stories about child abuse and foster care. He is the author of Wounded Innocents: The Real Victims of the War Against Child Abuse (Prometheus Books: 1990, 1995). Wexler has testified before Congress and State Legislatures and advised the U.S. Senate Subcommittee on Children and Families in its 1995 rewrite of the Child Abuse Prevention and Treatment Act. Wexler’s writing about the child welfare system has appeared in The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, the Chicago Tribune and other major newspapers, and he has been interviewed by The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Los Angeles Times, Time, the Associated Press, USA Today, 60 Minutes, National Public Radio, CNN, Good Morning America, Today, CBS This Morning, ABC World News Tonight, the CBS Evening News, and other media.
- Nicki Lancaster is a mother with lived experience, a music therapist, and perhaps, in another life she may have been an astronaut. She passionately believes that children's rights are of the utmost importance and that every person has a voice that needs to be heard and valued. so long as we silence people we will continue to aid injustice.
- Fay Belham is a disabled mum with lived experience , she as been a volunteer for Oxfam, and is part of Keep Britain Tidy. She is also a poet but she didn't know it. She writes all her own poems which are brilliant and we will have the pleasure of hearing her poems at this event.
- Jason Barnes is the founder of the social work action group (swag for short) and works for West Sussex as a child protection conference chair and IRO. Jason co-produced the SWAG 'language in social work ' video campaign with Tammy Mayes as well as other parents, care experienced people and professionals from across the country.