Registration

Registration for this workshop has closed, please enquire at werner@changeworks.co.za for new dates.

You’ve felt it. You may not have had the words for it.

You removed a child into a system you knew was overstretched. You sent a survivor of gender-based violence back to an unsafe home because there was no shelter place. You closed a case that wasn’t finished because a target said you had to. And when a systemic failure ended badly, you were the one held responsible.

None of that was a failure of your competence, or your commitment. It was the condition you were asked to work under – impossible caseloads, chronic under-resourcing, statutory duties that don’t wait for the resources to meet them, and a persistent gap between why you joined this profession and what the day-to-day actually allows you to do.

That gap has a name: moral injury. And too often it gets mislabelled as burnout – so practitioners are told to rest and self-care, when what they’re carrying is something rest alone cannot repair.

Burnout is depletion. Moral injury is violation. They can look the same from the outside, but they call for completely different responses. Learning to tell them apart is both a wellbeing and an ethical imperative, and it’s where this workshop begins.

What we’ll explore together

Naming and Understanding Moral Injury
We surface real experiences of moral challenge before the concept is even introduced, then give them precise language. You’ll work through the difference between moral injury, burnout, post-traumatic stress and compassion fatigue using scenario-sorting discussion, and map the four sources of moral injury – acts of commission, acts of omission, bearing witness, and betrayal by trusted authority – onto examples from your own settings, including the particular weight of institutional betrayal in the South African context.

Living With and Repairing Moral Injury
We turn to recognising the signs in yourself and in colleagues, then work through South African case vignettes drawn straight from frontline reality – a statutory removal into an over-stretched system, a survivor returned home for lack of a shelter place, forced termination of NGO services, being held accountable for a systemic failure. From there we explore pathways to repair, meaning-making, self-forgiveness, witnessing, accountability, reconnection with values, and practise the elements of genuine peer support that validate without fixing or pathologising.

Throughout, brief inputs from the established literature exist only to scaffold the discussion – not to replace it.

Who this is for

• Frontline statutory social workers in child protection and family services, where morally impossible decisions are routine
• Social workers in gender-based violence, health and correctional settings who bear witness to harm they cannot prevent
• Supervisors and managers who want to recognise and respond to moral injury in their teams
• Social workers in NGO and community organisations facing funding instability and forced service termination
• Any practitioner living the dissonance between their professional values and the conditions they’re required to work in

Give the experience a name. Then start to repair it.

If you’ve read this far, chances are something here already named an experience you’ve been carrying alone. You don’t have to keep carrying it unexamined – or mislabelled.

A structured, confidential, participation-led space built for practitioners, by someone who won’t pretend to have all the answers; because the answers are built together, from your experience.