This silence is in stark contrast to attention drawn to other social justice issues and raises questions about the profession’s commitment to racial equality and the pursuit of a just society. Far from the response seen south of the border, little Canadian social work research has been conducted on police racial profiling, and professional social work bodies have remained silent about ending this discriminatory practice. This article provides a critical analysis of the Canadian social work response to police racial profiling, as a human rights issue. Black Lives Matter–Toronto took on the fight to resist police killings and the devaluation of Black lives. A similar movement arose in Canada following the police killings of Jermaine Carby in 2014, Andrew Loku in 2015, and Abdirahman Abdi in 2016. Scholarly publications called for increased knowledge about racial profiling and for professional social work bodies to speak out against anti-Black police racism.
Galvanized by Martin’s death, #BlackLivesMatter directed US social work attention to the urgency of this human rights issue.
Trayvon Martin’s 2013 murder and the acquittal of his killer by a jury reignited long-standing race problems in the USA, particularly concerning the ill treatment of young Black men. The case demonstrates that the application of a strengths-focused approach to evaluating social justice interventions can be empowering for institutions and the communities they serve. The findings exemplify the positive psychological phenomena that emerge as a result of focusing the evaluation on program strengths. Drawing from the two disciplines of positive psychology and evaluation, this article illustrates a strengths-focused approach to formative evaluation using a case example of a halfway house for previously incarcerated women. However, there is a dearth of literature on using a strengths approach to evaluate interventions and programs to promote social justice. A strengths-focused evaluation approach has great promise for empowering individuals, groups, communities, and organizations, and identifying program strengths to build upon in addition to illuminating program deficits. The pursuit of culturally responsive approaches for designing and evaluating programs to promote social justice has become of the utmost importance to the evaluation community in the past decade.
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