As we mark Black History Month under the theme 30 Years of Black History Month: Honouring Black Brilliance Across Generations — From Nation Builders to Tomorrow’s Visionaries, I am reflecting on where my understanding of social work truly began and how it continues to live in me.

My mother was the first and inaugural social worker in my life. Long before theory, policy, or professional language, I learned social work by watching her. I learned through how she cared for family, advocated without title, navigated systems not designed for her, and held people together with limited resources and deep resolve. Alongside my mother, my aunties and my siblings shaped this understanding. Leadership, care, and responsibility were modeled daily.

Representation was not something I later sought in books or media. It was present, embodied, and immediate.

Looking back, I now recognize that I was immersed in micro and mezzo social work long before I could name it. Individual care rooted in dignity. Families are supported through informal networks. Community leadership that did not wait for permission. Black brilliance lived in kitchens, living rooms, places of worship, and neighbourhoods.

It was passed down through practice rather than policy, through relationship rather than rhetoric. These spaces were sites of intervention, protection, and healing, even if they were never labeled as such. At the time, much of this work unfolded in predominantly Black spaces, where care was collective, and survival was shared. What I did not yet fully understand were the systemic forces shaping those realities. Power and privilege were present, but often muted or unnamed.

It was later, particularly within a Canadian context and through formal education and professional spaces, that the macro picture came sharply into focus. Here, anti-Black racism is more explicitly named and more deeply embedded in systems. Policies, processes, and institutional practices clearly shape access to housing, education, employment, healthcare, and justice. These are not abstract concepts. They directly impact the social determinants of health and life outcomes for Black people. The inequities Black communities face are structural, sustained through decisions about who is prioritized, who is protected, and who is left to navigate harm on their own.

This realization did not diminish what I learned growing up. It clarified it. The care I witnessed in my family and community was not simply cultural strength. It was a response to systemic gaps and failures. Black families and communities were doing the work long before institutions arrived, and often because institutions did not. Understanding this deepened my commitment to macro advocacy, systems change, and leadership that directly confronts anti-Black racism and anti-Blackness.

These are grounded and transferable skills. They are intergenerational learnings that shape my leadership style, my approach to community supervision, and how I show up as a social worker.

This work is not something I woke up one day and chose. It is organic. It is embedded. It is in my DNA. As CEO of the Ontario Association of Social Workers, I remain committed to advancing a profession that understands Black history as foundational. One that values representation not as symbolism, but as a legitimate source of knowledge and practice wisdom.

Honouring Black brilliance across generations means recognizing that social work did not begin in classrooms and it does not end there. It lives in people, in community, and in the responsibility we carry forward.

This Black History Month, I invite you to reflect on who shaped your understanding of care, justice, and responsibility, and how those lessons continue to inform your practice today.

We are all stewards of something passed down. What we do with it matters.

             Ajirioghene Evi 

             CEO, Ontario Association of Social Workers