This is Volume 4 of “The Justice We Imagine”, a special series from Social Justice Origin Stories. This series focuses on storytellers’ responses to three essential questions:
When is true social justice possible?
What shapes our approach to the work?
Why does understanding and sharing our social justice origin stories matter?
As you listen to their responses, reflect on what your answers might be.
Patrick Taylor, LCSW, US Air Force veteran and doctoral student in Social Work at USC, tells the story of how learning about the Grand Challenges for Social Work in his program and being surprised by how few Social Workers knew about them led him to recognize the experience as a systemic issue. Taylor’s research led him to coin the phrase the Micro Pipeline in Social Work (MPISW), the systemic funneling of social workers into clinical roles at the expense of macro exposure, development, and support.
Taylor describes how social work’s identity became tied to a medical model and overly associated with mental health. He shares his own pathway from his early beginnings as a sociology student through his experiences with the clinical licensure process, and explains why he created Macro Pathways as an early-intervention, social worker-informed prototype to help students and professionals reimagine macro work, build community, and move the profession toward balance, prevention, and broader influence.
