The Human Services Professional

…is the result of a fully implemented set of professional standards for workers whose labor entails:

1. High impact decision-making

2. Wide discretion in the interpretation of human Intention, Behavior, and Circumstances

…such as Doctors, Teachers, or Police

The Human Services Professional 

By Dr. Anna Gersh

This is a proposal for a Human Services Professional Conference for the development of common scholarship toward improved practices. The Human Services Professional acknowledges the inherent relationship and need for mutual accountability across three critical social pillar professions: 

Education; Healthcare; and Governance (Lawmakers and Law Enforcers). To support this nascent professional certification, this proposal also asks for state sponsorship of an inaugural conference. 

Each of these professions require practitioners to be able to assess and make critical determinations about matters that directly impact individuals’ quality of life at the moment of interaction and often well into the future. These determinations may carry profound social and economic consequences. The school to prison pipeline; differential health outcomes based on race and class; and police violence are all well documented potential negative outcomes in these fields. These negative outcomes are the result of wide discretionary leeway combined with high impact decision-making. Each of these areas of service is a fundamentally siloed profession. Professional learning; Hiring and promotion practices; and Relevant scholarship are determined almost exclusively within the individual professions. This is the case in spite of the fact that existing partnerships across these professions have been effective at improving services and streamlining costs. 

If you ask police they will tell you that law enforcement is infinitely more compassionate and more broadly trained than ever before. Training partnerships with social service organizations and innovative training models have begun to take hold as a standard in departments across the country. It is clear that this de-siloing of police work has been useful to communities, and that developing partnerships between law enforcement and healthcare has been an effective jail diversion and cost saving strategy for numerous communities. 

Yet, despite these successful partnerships with education and healthcare, both human-centered, there is a persistent problem with police violence. Why were so many law enforcement-affiliated individuals implicated in the January 6th insurrection? What can be done to avoid the next George Floyd? 

Beginning to develop scholarship that will ultimately lead to a Human Services Professional Certification Program, is a way to magnify and prioritize the Point of Service Moment wherein the power of these professions lie. The assessment of human intention, behavior, and circumstances is where the mistakes are made. Human Services Professionals are the gatekeepers to resources that EVERYONE needs. They determine if you are to be ignored, forgiven, or punished. The Human Services Professional galvanizes a relationship across these three high-impact professions and there are potentially many more critical applications for such professional learning: Human Resource Personnel; Authors of Algorithms for Human Interface Artificial Intelligence; Bank Loan Officers, and many more. A professional organization and relevant body of professional learning that highlights the importance of appropriate interpretation and assessment at the point of service and encourages mutual accountability, is a natural and achievable positive step toward true equity. State sponsorship is required to clearly determine the intention of the organization as systemic and policy directed. 

These high-touch professions share a need for high quality professional development that emphasizes communication skills including active listening, effective questioning skills, and sensitivity to others’ emotional states. They also share a need for regular reflection on their unique social responsibility - the need for their praxis to be informed by current scholarship with respect to equity, social justice, and other known indicators of social well-being including the economic and political impacts of their decision-making. 

It is a statement of hope, in that state endorsement of such a relationship is an invitation for scholarship in the service of municipalities of the future. The establishment of a body that supports mutual accountability across these three essential services is a statement that says Michigan acknowledges the established value of partnerships across these professions and is prepared to formalize this relationship such that entities across the spectrum of such services will be encouraged to participate, regardless of affiliation. A Human Services Professional conference supported at the state level is an invitation to gather in the service of civic betterment. Conference management may be delegated to a host university setting, perhaps the University of Michigan or Michigan State - a centrally located public university with an interest in future-oriented public policy. 

The One Love Symposium is an opportunity to begin to develop the foundational scholarship that will inform the Human Services Professional. Using the public scholarship model, the One Love Symposium will create opportunities for engaged learning at multiple levels of the community. Using the arts and traditional scholarship generated by youth and university-affiliated scholars, participants are invited to weigh in on this historical moment’s most important question: What do we all have in common? Or more directly, What are Universal Human Values? 

The natural mission of the Human Services Professional must be built around universal human values. Any profession charged with exercising discretionary leeway to the degree with which we have entrusted the Human Services Professional, should be informed by such considerations. 

At this point we have had endless conversations about how to solve the problem of police violence that go nowhere. Activists and politicians make desperate promises in moments of high interest driven by crises, only to be forced to walk these promises back when they are revealed to be incompatible with public need or constitutional protections. The Human Services professional is the 10,000 foot view. It's not as immediately satisfying as other more aggressive solutions, but maybe because it's not as simple it may actually move more directly toward solving the problem. 

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