An Interdisciplinary Approach to the Grand Challenges: Tackling the Climate Crisis Using Multisolving

1

ABSTRACT

Developing social workers’ capacity and engagement in collaborative community-based innovations to climate-driven and other environmental hazards better ensures progress on the Grand Challenges. Such inclusive solutions value community leadership and are culturally responsive and justice-centered. Multisolving, pioneered by Dr. Elizabeth Sawin, offers a framework to pair social work goals from the Grand Challenges with climate-responsive interdisciplinary solutions by tackling multiple problems simultaneously with a single investment of resources. Exploring multisolving case studies that align closely with the Grand Challenge to create social responses to a changing environment, the authors consider collaborations and share experiences teaching courses and workshops that integrate multisolving into the social work curriculum and align with professional ethics to achieve these goals.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Kelly Smith

Kelly Smith is a Lecturer at Columbia University School of Social Work.

Melissa Indera Singh

Melissa Indera Singh is Associate Professor of Social Work, Practicum Education Coordinator, Professional Development and Online Learning at University of Southern California Suzanne Dworak-Peck School of Social Work.

Cassandra Breeze Ceballos

Cassandra Breeze Ceballos is Talk Climate Manager at Climate Generation.