What Now?
Ethics, Power, and Liberatory Praxis in Social Work
A Kindred Wellness® Program
Co-sponsored by Dr. Sabrina N'Diaye and The Heart Nest
CLAIM YOUR SEAT!
A 4-Week Cohort Experience for Practitioners Navigating Moral Injury
Thursdays, March 26-April 18, 2026
9:30 am -11:30 am EST VIRTUAL
Eligible for 8 CEs
Social workers are facing an ethical crisis.
We are expected to remain neutral in systems designed to harm, yet remaining apolitical is not social justice. In fact, many social workers are operating outside of our ethical orientation when we claim neutrality. We are told to be apolitical while witnessing policies that devastate the communities we serve.
We experience moral injury not because we are weak, but because we are awake to the contradiction.
While the NASW Code of Ethics centers social justice as a core value, social justice and liberation work are not the same. In the face of systemic oppression and upheaval, liberatory praxis goes beyond advocating for fairness within existing systems; it necessitates systemic change and transformation.
This training offers what most CEU courses do not: honest reckoning with power, constraint, and the real costs of liberatory action.
Over four weeks, we will examine how social work ethics have been weaponized to maintain the status quo, how to map power within organizations and systems, and how to develop a liberatory praxis that accounts for both your values and your survival.
This is not a training about what you should do. It is a training about how to think critically, assess honestly, and act with integrity under conditions of constraint.
What You'll Learn
Week 1 / March 26, 2026
Ethics, Power, and the Myth of Apolitical Social Work
You'll learn how professional "neutrality" actually maintains harmful systems and discover how to reclaim ethics as a tool for radical change instead of compliance.
Week 2 / April 2, 2026
Role Clarity and Power Analysis
You'll map where your values, identity, and professional role align or conflict, then analyze power in your workplace so you can act strategically without burning out.
Week 3 / April 9, 2026
Liberatory Frameworks and Levels of Action
You'll explore Liberation Psychology and the Black Radical Tradition, learn the Liberation-Focused Healing Framework, and identify where you can take action with integrity beyond social work interventions.
Week 4 / April 16, 2026
Liberatory Praxis in Real Life: Cost, Choice, and Consequence
You'll apply the Liberation-Focused Healing Framework to real workplace dilemmas, honestly assess what action costs you, and create a personal statement that guides how you'll show up when systems demand complicity.
Reviews of Previous Trainings...
This training was the best professional and personal development training I've ever attended so far in my career. Being a black woman, navigating the clinical space can be both challenging and frustrating when you recognize the drawbacks of what you learned in school and how it perpetuates colonial and oppressive ideals. This training not only acknowledged that challenge, it also provided a creative and innovative framework for how to change the stuck and frustrating feelings and therefore changing how you service the folks you work with. It was dope! And if you are not afraid to question everything you know about yourself and your perspective-then you are coming to the right place!
Grace Moore, Cohort 1
Who This Training Is For
This training is designed with social workers in mind. It invites the interrogation of appropriate allegiance to the NASW Code of Ethics' explicit commitment to social justice. All licensed mental health professionals (LMFTs, LCPCs, psychologists) committed to liberatory practice are more than welcome.
Social workers, therapists, and mental health professionals who are:
- Navigating tensions between organizational/institutional/structural demands and personal values
- Seeking practical frameworks beyond the theoretic
- Ready to think critically about power, complicity, and liberatory action
…And working across sectors including:
- Clinical practice (agencies, hospitals, community mental health, private practice)
- Health administration and leadership
- Policy and advocacy
- Community organizing
- Education and school-based services
- Child welfare and family services
- Criminal justice and reentry programs
- Nonprofit leadership and social entrepreneurship
Learning Objectives
By the end of this 4-week training, participants will be able to:
- Analyze how professional ethics have been shaped by colonial logics and identify alternatives
- Conduct basic power mapping to assess where they hold agency and where they face constraint
- Distinguish liberatory frameworks from diversity interventions and begin to understand liberation as a political orientation
- Apply liberatory praxis concepts to ethical dilemmas in their own work contexts
- Begin assessing the personal and professional costs of different courses of action
- Draft a personal liberatory praxis statement to guide future decision-making
- Name and contextualize moral injury as a collective response rather than individual failure
Course Pricing
Meet Your Instructor
Dr. Shawna Murray-Browne, LCSW-C
Instructor & Founder of 'Liberation-Focused Healing Framework'
Dr. Shawna Murray-Browne (she/her/hers) is a liberatory strategist, community scholar, spiritualist, mind-body healer and professional speaker. She is the Principal Consultant at Kindred Wellness LLC and trained as an integrative psychotherapist. Shawna is curious about what happens when we question colonial thinking and make space for the ways of knowing held by folk of African descent in every aspect of life.
In her hometown of Baltimore City, Shawna is known for holding grassroots healing circles to equip Black families and change-makers with the tools to heal themselves. Over a span of more than 16 years, she has worked in residential treatment, in grassroots community organizing, child welfare policy, research, in community school settings, juvenile detention centers and initially opened Kindred Wellness LLC as a liberation-focused healing private practice. She pulls from her lived experiences of navigating carceral, oppressive institutions and co-creating free, radical healing space for Black folk young and wise.
Shawna is supported by her own council of elders who offer guidance and have been committed to the fortification of her life's path for a collective of over 20 years. She identifies as a Womanist and is informed by African-Centered and Black Radical teachings.
She completed her doctorate at the University of Maryland, School of Social Work where she gained her Master of Social Work. Her dissertation explored oral histories as a decolonial site of inquiry around the healing ways of Black women advocates during the civil rights movement. She earned a Bachelor of Science in Criminology and Family Science from the University of Maryland, College Park.
Dedicated to continued growth, her practice in QiGong, Black spiritual traditions, and sitting at the feet of elders maintain. She lives in Baltimore with her excitable 8 year old, and her husband, "B."