Paper presented at 2009 JSWEC Conference. It’s more like learning together, being on an equal footing, using our collective mind (Comment by service user, 2009) The (abridged) story of service user and carer involvement in professional programmes at a distance learning university is presented here to illustrate the complexity of issues of identity and the context of the power relationships in which they are enacted. This paper will explore issues of identity in service user and carer involvement through reflection on roles, relationships and communication between service users, carers, tutors and academic managers as they have evolved during a five year period of joint work. Early work focused on initial engagement and setting the framework and tone of involvement. The second phase involved a task-centred approach, concentrating on specific tasks in the development and implementation of the honours social work degree, an on-going project. Service user and carer roles across the social work programme are identified and explored. Relationships are described as ‘co-learners’ in a process of development and discovery. A third stage sees the extension of the group to include colleagues from the wider Health and Social Care Faculty and the development of an on-line interactive website - a wiki- in combination with local face to face networks of service users and carers. This is an attempt to reach out to geographically dispersed populations and to make connections with under-represented groups. There will be an analysis of roles, relationships and communication strategies to extend the reach of service user and carer involvement. By illustration there will be a demonstration of the wiki and presentation of ‘job’ descriptions contained therein to identify opportunities for involvement and two-way influence, followed by discussion of issues of identity, inter-professional involvement and the benefits and limitations of on-line communication.

Paper presented at 2010 JSWEC Conference Writing in 1942, as America faced the crisis of joining World War II, Bertha Reynolds argued "The best preparation for adapting to the social work of the future, or to its absence if the good life of that time has no need for it, is to see it now, without illusions, as a part of our own time, and to face what we have with an active determination to be flexible enough ourselves so that we do not hold back its growth into something else". Sixty years later, these words resonate, at a time of what might be describes as ‘perpetual crisis’, within the profession and in the broader society within which social work is defined and practiced. This presentation offers social work practitioners and educators the opportunity to reflect on the context, social, economic, political and spiritual, local and global, that shapes social work practice. It asks: 1. What measures, personal, professional and organisational, must be implemented for practitioners to ‘hold the faith’ as brokers of hope for the poor and marginalised in this fluid, contested and arguably risk saturated practice environment; 2. What new (and perhaps old but neglected) capacities and/or philosophies can assist and nourish them; and 3. What educational strategies, pre- and post-qualifying, are necessary to develop the intellectual rigour, emotional strength and integrity necessary for empowered and creative practice. Bertha Capon Reynolds (1942) Learning and Teaching in the Practice of Social Work National Association of Social Workers, Silver Spring; Russell & Russell, New York