Summary

With a growing emphasis on improving human rights and alleviating social inequalities and human suffering in a world that is enduring massive environmental, demographic, technological, and geopolitical shifts, social work educators, scholars, and practitioners must determine how to prepare generalist and advanced generalist social work practitioners to engage in macro social work practice within their respective levels of competency. Steeped in ecological systems, person-in-environment, strengths, and empowerment perspectives, macro social work practice among general and advanced generalist practitioners have focused primarily on the communication, interaction, and transactional processes occurring between and among organizations, communities, and other systems. While beneficial, these perspectives do not account for differences in power, values, attitudes, beliefs, behavior, status, or roles between and among powerful and privileged entities in the system. By operating according to a humanistic perspective that accounts for differences in power, status, and roles of diverse entities in the system, generalist and advanced generalist practitioners engaged in macro social work practice may begin to alleviate social inequalities and human suffering occurring in the United States and abroad.