ABSTRACT
We welcome this opportunity to join with you to celebrate our strengths and consider the challenges we face as social group workers. There have been times in our past when group services seemed to be on the wane and when we were worried about our identity as social group workers, but this is not our current concern. As the papers and workshops at this symposium illustrate, groups are being used to respond to a vast array of individual and societal needs, problems, and issues. We are reaching out to new populations and to populations we have served in the past–the homeless, people with HIV-related disease, the violent and their victims, immigrants, the frail elderly and their families, children in need, angry adolescents, and the mentally ill. Groups are widely viewed as an important method not just for educating, supporting, socializing, and treating individuals, but also for empowering people and creating social change. In past decades, we were often hard-pressed to find any mention of groups, but now groups are a part of our culture. We have a high profile and get lots of attention, even in the popular press. The growing popularity of groups became clear to us from the frequency with which groups are presented in one small facet of the media–the cartoon pages.
