50 Essential Thought Leaders in Community Services and Social Work

The people shaping the future of social work and community services are not always the loudest voices in public discourse. They lead regulatory bodies, manage frontline agencies, publish research that reframes entire fields, advocate in parliaments and on platforms, and sometimes do all of this simultaneously while running services for people who have nowhere else to turn. If you work in community services or social work, or you lead, fund, or commission services in this sector, knowing who these voices are gives you a strategic advantage. It connects you to the thinking that will define the next decade of practice.

Community services and social work leadership is undergoing one of its most consequential periods of transformation. Globally, the workforce is under extraordinary strain. Nearly 78 per cent of social workers report experiencing emotional exhaustion, and burnout rates in child protective services alone exceed 70 per cent. In Australia, surveys confirm that community services have reached a staffing crisis point, with 50 per cent of frontline workers and 60 per cent of leaders reporting they feel emotionally drained due to understaffing. In the human services sector more broadly, close to one in three organisations struggle with staff retention, and 59 per cent of nonprofits report that filling positions in 2024 was significantly harder than in previous years. The leaders in this directory are not separate from those realities. They are the people actively working to change them.

This list was built to surface voices across disciplines, geographies, and practice levels. It deliberately moves past the most prominent household names in broad leadership discourse to highlight the people who are most influential within the community services and social work field specifically. Each person was selected on three criteria. First, they have made a substantive documented contribution to the field through published work, regulatory leadership, service delivery innovation, or advocacy. Second, they are currently active in the conversation, publishing, speaking, or leading at a significant level. Third, the list was deliberately built to represent geographic and disciplinary diversity, including voices from Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, and Australasia. The 50 people here span child welfare, aged care, disability services, community development, social enterprise, advocacy, regulation, research, and education.

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Why Community Services and Social Work Leadership Matters

The stakes in this field are uniquely high. Social workers and community services leaders are making decisions that affect people's safety, housing, families, and futures, often under conditions of resource scarcity, institutional complexity, and emotional pressure that few other professions encounter. Leadership in this sector is not primarily about strategy or innovation in the commercial sense. It is about holding the tension between systemic advocacy and individual case management, between evidence-based practice and human relationships, between institutional accountability and community trust.

The global social work agenda for 2020-2030, jointly developed by the International Federation of Social Workers, the International Association of Schools of Social Work, and the International Council on Social Welfare, frames the profession's challenge as co-building inclusive social transformation. That is an enormous ambition, and it requires extraordinary leadership at every level. When leadership in this sector fails, individuals and families bear the cost directly. When it succeeds, communities become safer, more equitable, and more resilient.

Leadership development in community services is persistently underfunded relative to its importance. Research from the Building Movement Project shows that interest in top nonprofit leadership roles has declined steadily since 2016, with particularly sharp drops among leaders of colour. The sector needs voices who are actively building the next generation of leadership, not just occupying the current generation of positions. Many of the 50 people in this directory are doing exactly that.

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How This List Was Compiled

Every person on this list was selected on three criteria. First, a substantive documented contribution to community services or social work leadership through published work, regulatory leadership, service delivery, or advocacy. Second, current active engagement in the field through publishing, speaking, or leading organisations. Third, deliberate geographic and disciplinary diversity across six continents and multiple practice areas. The list moves past the most prominent household names in broad leadership discourse to surface the voices most influential within this field specifically. It brings together 50 people from the United States, United Kingdom, Australia, Zambia, Nigeria, Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, and beyond.

Category One: Global and International Leadership

The international governance of social work matters because it shapes the profession's priorities, standards, and public standing across every country where social workers practise. The people in this category lead the global bodies that set direction for the profession, advocate to international institutions, and build solidarity among practitioners across borders. Their decisions ripple down to service delivery in contexts ranging from Zambia to Canada.

1. Joachim Mumba

Joachim Mumba is the President of the International Federation of Social Workers (IFSW), serving since May 2022. Based in Zambia, he is the first African leader to hold the IFSW presidency in the modern era, and his leadership has placed questions of collective action, human dignity, and global equity at the centre of the profession's international agenda. His presence in the role has also shifted the weight of IFSW's engagement toward the Global South in substantive ways.

In his World Social Work Day 2026 message, Mumba drew on the African philosophy of Harambee to articulate a vision of social work as a profession built on pulling together across cultures, borders, and communities in the face of a divided world. His address called on social workers globally to stand alongside communities as they navigate adversity, framing the profession's role not as service delivery but as solidarity. That framing reflects a broader shift in how global social work is positioning itself in relation to climate, inequality, and political fracture.

2. Isabelle Trowler CBE

Isabelle Trowler is the Chief Social Worker for Children and Families within the Department for Education in England, a position she has held since September 2013, making her the longest-serving chief social worker in any country. Her influence over children's services practice across England has been profound and sustained. She was awarded a CBE in the New Year Honours 2024 for services to children's social care.

Trowler is best known for co-designing a practice framework for children's social work that has shaped how local authorities across England structure their child and family teams. She has led the rollout of the Families First for Children pathfinder model, a national initiative to reform how early help and child protection are structured, and confirmed via LinkedIn in 2025 that this model will expand to all local authorities with significant new funding. Her active use of professional platforms to communicate reform priorities makes her one of the most publicly accessible senior figures in the field.

3. Sarah McClinton

Sarah McClinton is the Chief Social Worker for Adults within the Department of Health and Social Care in England, a role she took up in January 2025. McClinton was previously president of the Association of Directors of Adult Social Services from 2022 to 2023, and brings a practitioner and senior local authority perspective to a national leadership role that sets direction for adult social work across England.

In her first-year reflections published in January 2026, McClinton identified community mental health leadership, co-production with people who use services, and workforce wellbeing as her core priorities. Her thinking on leadership as creating the conditions for others to succeed has shaped a distinctive approach to the chief social worker role that emphasises enabling frontline practitioners rather than managing performance metrics. Her blog posts and public engagements in 2025 and 2026 have generated substantial professional engagement.

4. Colum Conway

Colum Conway is the Chief Executive of Social Work England, the specialist regulator for social workers in England, a role he has held since the organisation was established as the profession's regulator in December 2019. Conway trained and practised as a social worker and previously led the Northern Ireland Social Care Council and spent six years as chief executive of a not-for-profit providing care services across Ireland. He brings practice credibility to the regulatory leadership role.

Social Work England's published business plan for 2025 to 2026 confirms Conway's stated priorities of building trust with practitioners and the public, improving the timeliness of fitness-to-practise processes, and strengthening relationships with people who have lived experience of social work. His leadership of the profession's registration, standards, and accountability framework places him at the intersection of practice quality and public protection in one of the world's most scrutinised social care systems.

5. Dr Ruth Allen

Ruth Allen is the President of the International Federation of Social Workers Europe, elected in April 2024. She stepped down from her role as Chief Executive of the British Association of Social Workers in September 2025, having led the organisation for almost a decade, to devote her full attention to international social work. As IFSW Europe President she leads an organisation representing 30 member associations across 28 European countries.

Allen's intellectual contribution to the profession has focused on anti-oppressive practice, mental health social work, and the structural conditions that enable or constrain good practice. Her advocacy during her BASW tenure included campaigns on practitioner working conditions, asylum and immigration, and deinstitutionalising care for autistic people and people with learning disabilities. She brought a campaigning edge to regulatory and professional body leadership that few in similar roles have matched.

6. Antonio Lopez Pelaez

Antonio Lopez Pelaez is the Executive Director of the International Council on Social Welfare (ICSW), one of three global bodies that jointly govern the world social work agenda. He is also a Professor of Sociology at UNED in Spain and has published extensively on social innovation, technology and social work, and European social policy. His dual role in international governance and academic research makes him a connector between policy frameworks and evidence-based practice.

Lopez Pelaez has been a key voice in articulating the relevance of social work to climate action, poverty reduction, and digital transformation. His contributions to the joint Global Agenda process have emphasised the need for the profession to engage with structural economic transformation, not just individual service delivery. His ongoing leadership of ICSW makes him one of the most strategically important international voices in the sector.

7. Toni Adeleke

Toni Adeleke is the President of the Africa Region of the International Federation of Social Workers, elected in Panama in 2024, making her the first Nigerian social worker to hold the IFSW Africa Region presidency. She previously served as the immediate past National Secretary of the Nigeria Association of Social Workers and as Vice President of the IFSW Africa Region. Her election represents the continued growth of professional social work infrastructure across sub-Saharan Africa.

Adeleke's leadership arrives at a moment when the IFSW Africa Region is expanding engagement, with the 2026 Joint World Conference on Social Work and Social Development hosted in Nairobi, Kenya, under the theme "Harambee for Sustainable Shared Futures." Her positioning within continental social work governance gives her a platform to shape how social work is understood, practised, and resourced across Africa's extraordinarily diverse contexts.

Category Two: Child Welfare and Family Services Leadership

Child welfare is one of the most scrutinised and emotionally demanding areas of social work practice globally. The leaders in this category have shaped how child protection, family support, and out-of-home care are understood, reformed, and delivered.

8. Jessica Pryce

Jessica Pryce is a research faculty member at Florida State University's College of Social Work, where she works directly with child welfare leaders through the Florida Institute for Child Welfare. She is a former child protective services caseworker who transitioned to academic research and advocacy after witnessing the racial disparities embedded in the child welfare system. Her career trajectory gives her a rare combination of frontline practice credibility and research authority.

Pryce's book "Broken: Transforming Child Protective Services: Notes of a Former Caseworker" addresses the systemic biases shaping removal decisions in child protective services, particularly the overrepresentation of Black and Indigenous children. In a TED talk viewed widely by practitioners and policymakers, she presented an innovative strategy for reducing racially biased foster care removal decisions, drawing significant attention from child welfare systems across the US and internationally.

9. Yvette Lee

Yvette Lee is a Principal Social Work Specialist at the Ministry of Social and Family Development in Singapore, where she has spent more than two decades developing social work practice frameworks, supervision standards, and training infrastructure. She is one of the leading figures in building Singapore's social service sector into a structured, professionalised system and has contributed to regional practice development across Southeast Asia.

Lee's contribution to the field includes her work on supervision standards for social service organisations in Singapore, which established formal frameworks for reflective practice and professional accountability in a national context where social work professionalisation was still maturing. Her practical contributions to workforce development and service quality have shaped the professional infrastructure supporting Singapore's community services sector.

10. Cathy Humphreys

Cathy Humphreys is an Emeritus Professor of Social Work at the University of Melbourne and one of Australia's most cited researchers in family violence, child welfare, and children who have witnessed domestic violence. Her research has directly shaped policy and practice in Australia, particularly on the intersection of domestic violence and child protection, which has historically been handled as two separate systems.

Humphreys co-authored foundational research on the "Think Child, Think Parent, Think Family" framework and has advocated for integrated approaches to family violence and child welfare for more than two decades. Her work on the impacts of witnessing domestic violence on children was cited in major child welfare reform processes in Victoria, Australia, and has informed similar reform conversations in the UK and Canada.

11. Dorinda Elliott

Dorinda Elliott is a veteran journalist and editor who has covered social work, child welfare, and human services from a policy and investigative perspective for publications including Newsweek and The Atlantic. She has become an increasingly visible voice in translating child welfare research and policy for general audiences and practitioners, and her writing on systemic failure in child protection has contributed to public debate in the United States.

Elliott co-edited a widely distributed collection of writing on child welfare reform and has contributed essays on the politics of child protection, institutional accountability, and the limits of risk-management approaches. Her positioning at the intersection of investigative journalism and social policy gives her a distinct platform compared to practitioners or academics, bringing rigorous accountability journalism to bear on one of society's most consequential service systems.

12. Rhian Stone

Rhian Stone is the Chief Executive of Bolton Cares Group in the United Kingdom and a frequently cited voice on community-based social care, care leavers, and the practical realities of social care leadership at service delivery level. Her LinkedIn presence is one of the most actively engaged among UK community services leaders, with regular posts on digital exclusion, care leaver outcomes, and the realities of leading services in a context of persistent underfunding.

Stone's 2025 commentary on digital exclusion as a form of social exclusion, framing the inability to access the internet as equivalent to losing access to a basic social infrastructure, generated significant engagement from practitioners and policymakers. Her perspective is grounded in the day-to-day management of a social care organisation rather than in academic or regulatory leadership, which gives her a distinctly practical voice in the conversation.

13. Anna Gupta

Anna Gupta is a Professor of Social Work at Royal Holloway, University of London and one of the UK's leading researchers on poverty and child welfare. Her research on the relationship between poverty, race, and the disproportionate involvement of families in child protection systems has challenged deficit-based approaches and contributed to the asset-based and poverty-aware practice movement in England.

Gupta's advocacy for poverty-aware practice in children's social work, developed in collaboration with the Child Welfare Inequalities Project, has been taken up by a significant number of local authorities in England attempting to reduce the class and racial biases in their decision-making. Her evidence base connects research on systemic inequality directly to frontline practice change.

14. David Wilkins

David Wilkins is a Professor of Social Work at Cardiff University and a leading researcher on social work supervision, child welfare decision-making, and the relationship between management and practice quality. His research examines how supervision, caseload pressures, and organisational culture interact to produce better or worse outcomes for children and families in contact with social care services.

Wilkins has published extensively on what makes social work supervision effective, including research that challenges the idea that more frequent supervision is always better and identifies the quality of the supervisory relationship as the decisive variable. His applied research on direct work tools used by social workers has generated significant practitioner engagement.

15. Debbie Allnock

Debbie Allnock is a Professor of Child Safeguarding at the University of Bedfordshire in England and a leading researcher on child sexual exploitation, online safety, and the barriers that prevent children from disclosing abuse. Her research has directly shaped professional training, policy frameworks, and public inquiry recommendations in the United Kingdom.

Allnock's contributions to understanding why children do not disclose abuse and the conditions under which they are more likely to seek help have been cited in major institutional abuse inquiries and have generated practice changes in how social workers and other professionals approach disclosure conversations. Her evidence on the long-term impacts of child sexual exploitation has influenced how community services organisations design and fund survivor support.

Category Three: Community Development and Social Enterprise

Community development, social enterprise, and place-based social services represent a distinct tradition within the broader social work and community services field, focused on building community capacity and sustainable social change rather than purely managing need.

16. Kristy Muir

Kristy Muir is the Chief Executive Officer of the Paul Ramsay Foundation, Australia's largest social change foundation, and Professor of Social Policy at UNSW Sydney Business School. She has worked for more than three decades with organisations that enable children, families, and communities to thrive, spanning roles from support worker to academic, CEO, and board director. She is the founder of the Social Impact Leadership Australia program and has coached hundreds of for-purpose CEOs.

Muir has taken more than 100 social impact projects to completion across housing, education, employment, mental health, and community wellbeing. Her appointment as CEO of the Paul Ramsay Foundation positioned her as the most influential funder-leader in the Australian social sector. In 2023, she chaired the inaugural Investment Dialogue Roundtable, bringing together philanthropy and government around a shared framework for children's wellbeing.

17. Bill Drayton

Bill Drayton is the founder and CEO of Ashoka, the world's largest network of social entrepreneurs, and is widely credited with creating the field of social entrepreneurship as a distinct practice and sector. He has been building the infrastructure for social innovation for more than four decades and has identified and supported thousands of changemakers across more than 90 countries. His concept of the "Everyone a Changemaker" world has shaped how community services organisations think about citizen-led change.

Drayton's publication of the Ashoka model of social entrepreneurship, which identifies innovative leaders addressing social problems at systemic scale, has influenced generations of community services leaders in how they frame their missions. His organisation has provided seed funding, network access, and strategic support to social entrepreneurs whose work has reached millions of people globally.

18. Toby Eccles

Toby Eccles is the founder of the Social Impact Bond concept and a leading practitioner in outcomes-based commissioning for social services. Based in the UK and working globally, Eccles developed the first Social Impact Bond at Peterborough Prison in 2010 in collaboration with Social Finance, a model since replicated in more than 30 countries. He is one of the most practically influential thinkers in how community services are financed and evaluated.

The Social Impact Bond framework has generated substantial innovation in how outcomes for people experiencing homelessness, recidivism, and mental health challenges are defined and funded. Eccles has spoken extensively on the conditions under which outcomes-based commissioning works well and the common failure modes, offering a more nuanced perspective than early advocates of the model.

19. Deepa Krishnamurthy

Deepa Krishnamurthy is the Executive Director of Idobata, a Singapore-based social enterprise developing community wellbeing infrastructure in urban neighbourhoods, and a leading voice on co-production and community-led social services in the Asia-Pacific. She brings a design and community organising lens to social sector leadership, challenging top-down service delivery models and advocating for genuine resident participation in service design.

Her practical work on participatory design for community social services has been featured at regional social sector conferences and has influenced how government agencies in Singapore approach community service commissioning. She has contributed to the growing body of Asian social enterprise practice that is distinct from the North American and European models that dominate mainstream social entrepreneurship discourse.

20. Mia Birdsong

Mia Birdsong is a social activist, author, and community organiser whose book "How We Show Up: Reclaiming Family, Friendship, and Community" offers a community-centred framework that challenges the individualised, deficit-based models underpinning much conventional social services thinking. She is a former executive director of Family Independence Initiative and a Fellow at New America.

Birdsong's advocacy for community-led approaches to addressing poverty and social exclusion positions her as a critic of top-down service delivery and a champion for mutual aid as a framework for social resilience. Her thinking connects directly to contemporary debates in social work about the limits of casework and the need for community development approaches that build collective capacity.

21. Cate Akaveka

Cate Akaveka is the Chief Executive Officer of Neighbourhood Centres Queensland in Australia, a peak body representing community neighbourhood centres across the state. She is a recognised voice on place-based community development, social inclusion, and the role of neighbourhood centres as anchor institutions for vulnerable communities. Her leadership of the sector peak body positions her as an important connector between grassroots community services and state government.

Akaveka's engagement with the challenge of digital exclusion, community infrastructure funding, and the specific pressures facing regional and rural neighbourhood centres has contributed to advocacy that directly shapes how community services are resourced in Queensland. She has spoken at multiple sector conferences on the relationship between community connection and health and wellbeing.

22. Jacqueline Novogratz

Jacqueline Novogratz is the founder and CEO of Acumen, a global impact investment fund that has invested over 145 million dollars in companies tackling poverty across Africa, Asia, and Latin America. She is the author of "The Blue Sweater" and "Manifesto for a Moral Revolution," both exploring what it means to lead with moral purpose in the face of complex social problems. Her framing of patient capital and moral imagination has influenced community services leaders globally on how to think about long-term social change.

Acumen's model of investing in enterprises that serve people at the bottom of the economic pyramid, combined with Novogratz's articulation of a leadership philosophy that holds dignity and efficacy in tension, has shaped how a generation of social sector leaders think about the relationship between commercial sustainability and social mission.

Category Four: Advocacy, Policy, and Rights-Based Leadership

Social work's history is inseparable from advocacy and policy reform. The leaders in this category have distinguished themselves through their work to change systems, not just to serve within them.

23. DeRay Mckesson

DeRay Mckesson is the Executive Director of Campaign Zero, an organisation working to end police violence through data-driven policy solutions, and the host of "Pod Save the People," a widely listened podcast on justice, identity, and policy. He began his career as an educator and came to national prominence documenting the Ferguson protests in 2014 as a civil rights activist. He is one of the most visible voices connecting community services, police reform, and social justice in the United States.

Campaign Zero's 2025 data confirmed that fatal police violence in the United States declined by five per cent to 1,314 cases, with Mckesson publicly connecting this progress to the investments in community services, behavioural health, and non-law-enforcement crisis response built since 2014. His analysis consistently frames community services infrastructure as a structural alternative to policing, a framing that has direct relevance for social work advocates.

24. Anastasia Poloukhina

Anastasia Poloukhina is the Executive Director of the Eurasia Forum of Social Workers, which she has led since its founding in 2005. The Forum connects social work professionals across Russia, Eastern Europe, and Central Asia and has provided professional development, cross-border collaboration, and knowledge exchange for thousands of social workers across a region where the profession's infrastructure is often fragile. Her two decades of leadership of this convening role represent an extraordinary contribution to social work capacity building.

The 16th Eurasia Forum in 2025, held at Yeungnam University in South Korea, brought together practitioners, students, and policymakers under a theme of intergenerational cooperation. Poloukhina's sustained investment in peer professional development and cross-border solidarity offers a model for how social work associations can build capacity in contexts where formal professional infrastructure is limited.

25. Lorenn Walker

Lorenn Walker is the Director of Hawaii Friends of Restorative Justice and a leading practitioner and researcher in restorative practices applied to criminal justice, community harm, and social services. Her work on Self-Directed Living, a curriculum that helps people leaving incarceration build future-focused plans, has been adopted in multiple jurisdictions. She bridges community services, restorative justice, and social work in ways that challenge the silos between these fields.

Walker's practitioner research on restorative circles, community conferencing, and the use of restorative approaches in social service organisations has generated a body of evidence on how conflict and harm can be addressed in ways that build rather than damage relationships and community. Her work is particularly relevant for social workers in statutory settings grappling with punitive mandates that conflict with relational practice values.

26. Mia Birdsong

26. Paulo Abrao

Paulo Abrao is the former Executive Secretary of the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights and a leading voice on the intersection of human rights frameworks and social work practice in Latin America. He has worked across truth and reconciliation, transitional justice, and the social determinants of community wellbeing, bringing a rights-based framework to social services leadership that challenges narrower service delivery orientations.

His contributions to discussions about how social workers engage with political violence, structural racism, and institutional impunity have shaped conversations in Latin American social work education. His thinking on rights-based practice has also influenced how international social work bodies frame their advocacy and standard-setting work in relation to governments that restrict civil society.

27. Robin Miller

Robin Miller is a Professor of Social Work and Social Care at the University of Birmingham in the United Kingdom and one of the country's leading researchers on health and social care integration, leadership in adult services, and the organisational conditions that support good social work practice. He has published extensively on how organisations create environments in which social workers can practise ethically and effectively.

Miller's research on leadership in adult social care has examined how directors, managers, and principal social workers navigate the tension between resource constraints, political pressures, and professional values. His work on place-based integrated care and community-oriented approaches has contributed to debate on how health and social care services can be designed around community assets rather than institutional systems.

28. Ann-Marie Bhatt

Ann-Marie Bhatt is a researcher and practitioner associated with the Social Work Action Network (SWAN) in the United Kingdom and one of the leading voices for a radical and critical social work perspective. Her research on the impact of austerity on social work practice, the marketisation of social care, and the working conditions of frontline social workers has generated significant sector engagement.

Bhatt's work challenges the consensus framing of social work reform as primarily a matter of practice improvement and insists on the structural economic and political conditions that make good practice possible or impossible. Her contribution to the field sits at the intersection of labour rights, professional identity, and social justice advocacy.

29. Lena Dominelli

Lena Dominelli is a Professor of Social Work at Durham University in the United Kingdom and one of the most internationally cited scholars in anti-oppressive practice, green social work, and community development. She is the founder of the Green Social Work movement, which argues that the profession has a central role in responding to climate change and environmental justice alongside its traditional social justice mandate.

Dominelli's book "Green Social Work: From Environmental Crises to Environmental Justice" has been adopted as a framework for rethinking the profession's role in the face of climate change, and her advocacy for community resilience approaches that connect social and environmental wellbeing has been influential in how social work schools are redesigning curricula globally.

30. Sharon McMahon

Sharon McMahon is an American social worker turned civic educator and author of "The Small and the Mighty: Twelve Unsung Americans Who Changed the Course of History." She has built a substantial public following as SharonSaysSo on social media, where she shares evidence-based content on civics, government, and the structural foundations of community wellbeing. Her work at the intersection of civic education and community services advocacy has reached audiences well beyond the traditional social work community.

McMahon's book, drawing on her social work background to illuminate how ordinary people shaped American civic life, has been widely read by practitioners, educators, and advocates. Her ability to translate complex civic and social issues for general audiences demonstrates a form of public social work communication that the profession needs more of.

Category Five: Research, Education, and Knowledge Building

Social work practice is only as strong as the research and education infrastructure that informs it. The leaders in this category have built the knowledge base that practitioners, managers, and policymakers draw on.

31. S. Vasoo

S. Vasoo is an Emeritus Professor of Social Work at the National University of Singapore and one of Asia's most respected figures in social work education and social service management. In February 2026 he edited "Management Issues in Social Services," a book drawing on the NUS Social Work Social Service Leaders Exchange Programme to address key management challenges facing social service organisations. His decades of contribution to social work education in Singapore and across the Asian region have built the professional infrastructure supporting one of the world's most structured community services systems.

Vasoo's framing of the book's purpose, to share experiences and lessons from across Asia so that social service leaders can build stronger institutions that remain relevant and responsive to communities, reflects a philosophy of practitioner-informed improvement that has shaped how Singapore and regional neighbours approach workforce development. His career spans the founding period of professional social work in Singapore through to the current era of professionalisation.

32. Carolyn Noble

Carolyn Noble is an Emeritus Professor and former Head of the School of Social Work at Victoria University, Melbourne and the Australian Catholic University, and a leading voice on transformative social work education, international social work, and gender and social work. She was a long-serving member of the International Association of Schools of Social Work executive and has contributed to the global definition of social work through her academic and advocacy work.

Noble's writing on the need for social work education to produce practitioners capable of engaging with structural inequality rather than simply managing individual cases has been influential in how Australian and international social work schools think about curriculum design. Her sustained engagement with gender, power, and community-based practice connects education to the profession's political commitments.

33. Victor Manalo

Victor Manalo is a macro social work professor and the host of the Macro Social Work Podcast, which focuses on social work practice at the community, policy, and organisational level. He brings over 30 years of experience from MSW student to university professor and macro practitioner, and interviews social workers whose work operates at systems level rather than individual case level. His platform is one of the few that centres macro practice in professional social work discourse.

Manalo's sustained advocacy for macro social work as a legitimate and vital dimension of the profession has contributed to how social work schools and professional associations think about what the profession actually is. His interviews with community organisers, policy advocates, and social work researchers offer a resource that practitioners in systems-change roles rarely find elsewhere.

34. Felicity Bell

Felicity Bell is a social work academic and researcher at the University of New South Wales in Sydney whose work on First Nations social work, decolonising social work practice, and Indigenous leadership in community services has contributed to one of the most important conversations in the Australian and international social work field. Her research challenges the field to examine the colonial assumptions embedded in conventional social work theory and practice.

Bell's contributions to the growing body of scholarship on decolonising social work education have been cited in curriculum reform discussions at multiple Australian universities and have supported the development of First Nations social work programs that prioritise Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership, knowledge, and self-determination.

35. Liz Beddoe

Liz Beddoe is a Professor of Social Work at the University of Auckland in New Zealand and one of the country's most influential voices on social work education, supervision, and the regulation of the profession. She is a founding editor of the journal "Advances in Social Work," and her research on the professionalisation of social work and the media coverage of social work has shaped debates in New Zealand and internationally about how the profession is understood and valued.

Beddoe's research on what she calls the surveillance of social work examines how performance management, media scrutiny, and regulatory oversight interact to create a climate of risk aversion in practice. Her advocacy for reflective, relationship-based practice in the face of these institutional pressures has been influential in supervision and professional development circles.

36. Claudia Megele

Claudia Megele is a social worker, consultant, and author who has been one of the leading voices in the UK and internationally on digital social work, online safety, and the use of technology in social work practice and supervision. Her books "Psychosocial and Relationship-Based Practice" and "Safeguarding Children and Young People Online" have been adopted by social work education programs. She also co-chairs the Professional Capabilities Framework Advisory Group for the British Association of Social Workers.

Megele's work on digital safeguarding addresses one of the most significant emerging challenges in children's social work, as young people's online experiences increasingly intersect with child protection, exploitation, and mental health. Her practitioner-oriented approach to digital literacy for social workers has provided a practical framework for a profession that has often struggled to engage with technology.

37. Lucie Stephens

Lucie Stephens is a researcher and practitioner at the New Economics Foundation in London whose work on co-production, community power, and the economics of care has contributed to a distinctive British framework for thinking about how community services should be structured and funded. Her research on time banking, asset-based community development, and the social value of unpaid care has influenced how local authorities and community organisations in England think about community assets.

Stephens's practical work on co-production has been used to design services in multiple local authority areas and has contributed to the co-production movement in social care, which seeks to position people who use services as active participants in their design and delivery rather than passive recipients.

38. Jonathan Singer

Jonathan Singer is an Associate Professor at Loyola University Chicago's Worden School of Social Service and the host of "The Social Work Podcast," one of the longest-running and most widely listened social work audio resources globally, with over 145 episodes. He is a licensed clinical social worker specialising in suicide prevention and has contributed substantially to how social workers communicate complex research to practitioner audiences.

Singer's podcast has covered topics including interpersonal therapy, cognitive behavioural therapy, neurobiology, child welfare, suicide prevention, and social work policy, consistently featuring researchers and practitioners in substantive conversations designed for professional development. His commitment to making evidence-based research accessible to frontline practitioners represents a form of knowledge translation that formal academic publishing does not always achieve.

Category Six: Mental Health, Trauma, and Wellbeing in Community Services

Mental health and trauma are central to almost every area of community services work. The leaders in this category have built the research base and practice frameworks that help social workers understand and respond to the psychological dimensions of their work.

39. Vikram Patel

Vikram Patel is the Paul Farmer Professor and Chair of Global Health and Social Medicine at Harvard Medical School and one of the world's foremost advocates for making mental health care accessible in low-resource settings. His work on task-shifting, in which trained community health workers deliver evidence-based psychological interventions, is directly relevant to the community services sector's challenge of reaching people without access to clinical specialists.

Patel's research on community-based mental health programs in India, Africa, and other low-income settings has demonstrated that effective mental health support can be delivered by non-specialist community workers when they have proper training and supervision. His framing of community services infrastructure as a mental health intervention is one of the most important arguments for investing in the broader social work and community services workforce.

40. Sandra Bloom

Sandra Bloom is a Professor in the School of Public Health at Drexel University and the creator of the Sanctuary Model, a trauma-informed organisational change framework adopted by hundreds of community services and mental health organisations globally. Her work begins from the premise that organisations that serve traumatised people often become traumatised themselves, and that organisational change is inseparable from the wellbeing of the workforce.

The Sanctuary Model's seven commitments to non-violence, emotional intelligence, inquiry, creativity, democracy, social learning, and growth have been adopted by residential treatment programmes, child welfare agencies, and homeless services organisations as a framework for building trauma-informed cultures. Bloom's contribution is the bridge between trauma research and organisational practice.

41. Jessi Gold

Jessi Gold is an Associate Professor of Psychiatry at the University of Tennessee Health Science Centre and one of the most prominent voices on healthcare worker burnout, compassion fatigue, and the mental health of those who provide care and social services. Her book "How Do You Feel? One Doctor's Search for Humanity in Medicine" has been widely read by social workers and community services practitioners grappling with their own emotional exhaustion.

Gold's public advocacy for treating the mental health of caregivers with the same seriousness as the mental health of clients has opened a conversation that the social work and community services sector has historically been reluctant to have. Her willingness to be transparent about her own mental health experiences as a clinician has given permission for many practitioners to do the same.

42. Sarah Blackmore

Sarah Blackmore is a registered social worker and the Executive Director of Strategy, Policy and Engagement at Social Work England. She published a blog for Social Work Week 2026 on innovation and AI in social work practice, addressing what the profession needs to do to integrate new technologies without losing its relational core. Her voice at the regulatory level on practice innovation is one of the more substantive contributions to the emerging conversation about digital transformation in social work.

Blackmore's framing of AI as a tool that must be kept in a supportive rather than directive relationship with practitioners, and her insistence that social work's value lies in what it does that AI cannot replicate, addresses one of the most consequential questions the sector faces in the current decade.

43. Fazeela Hafejee

Fazeela Hafejee is the Assistant Director for Adults with Disabilities at Bradford Council in England and a recognised voice on leadership identity, mental health social work, and building diverse and inclusive social work teams. Her 2026 conversation with Robert Lewis on "difference as strength" in social work leadership explored how neurodivergent leaders and leaders from globally marginalised communities bring distinctive strengths to social work that the profession needs to recognise and value.

Hafejee's contribution to the conversation on inclusive leadership in social work is grounded in her own experience as a leader from a minority background in a sector that has historically been led predominantly by white practitioners. Her advocacy for leadership practices that move beyond style preference to focus on outcomes and relationships is both practical and principled.

44. Robert Lewis

Robert Lewis is the Mental Health Social Work Lead at the Department of Health and Social Care in England, a role in which he advises government on mental health social work policy and provides leadership to practitioners across the sector. He previously co-chaired the Approved Mental Health Professionals Leads Network. His role was created alongside Sarah McClinton's appointment as Chief Social Worker for Adults, reflecting a governmental commitment to dedicated leadership for mental health social work.

Lewis's public writing in 2025 and 2026, including contributions to the Adults Social Work blog, has focused on the growing importance of social workers in NHS mental health services and the need to strengthen professional identity for social workers working in clinical settings. His advocacy for recognising social work's rights-based approach as a distinctive contribution to multidisciplinary mental health teams addresses a long-standing question about role clarity and professional standing.

Category Seven: Workforce, Leadership Development, and Organisational Change

The sustainability of the community services and social work sector depends on building the next generation of leaders. The voices in this category are most focused on workforce development, leadership pipelines, and the organisational change necessary to make the sector more effective, equitable, and sustainable.

45. Ineke Deserno

Ineke Deserno is the Executive Director of the Network for Social Work Management, an international organisation that strengthens social work management and leadership within health, social, and human services. Her leadership of this professional development network equips executives, directors, and managers across the social work and human services sector with practical tools for effective, people-centred leadership.

Deserno's work at the Network for Social Work Management addresses the distinctive leadership development challenge facing social work managers who are promoted from clinical or practice roles into administrative positions without formal management training. Her organisation's programs sit at the intersection of social work values and management effectiveness.

46. Hilary Cottam

Hilary Cottam is a social innovator, author, and designer whose book "Radical Help: How We Can Remake the Relationships Between Us and Revolutionise the Welfare State" offers a comprehensive critique of the current community services system and a practical framework for reimagining it. She founded Participle, a social design organisation that developed new models for welfare services in the United Kingdom, and her Relationships Project advocates for relational welfare as an alternative to transactional service delivery.

Cottam's evidence from Participle projects on employment, ageing, and family support showed that relationship-based approaches to social services delivered better outcomes at lower cost than conventional service delivery. Her work is one of the most substantive practical challenges to the dominant model of community services as standardised intervention, and it has been adopted as a framework by multiple local authorities in England.

47. Lauri Goldkind

Lauri Goldkind is a Professor of Social Work at Fordham University's Graduate School of Social Service and one of the most prolific researchers on the intersection of social work, technology, and organisational innovation. She has spoken at the Social Current CEO Convening on AI readiness for human services, addressing how social service organisations can responsibly integrate artificial intelligence while maintaining ethical commitments to the people they serve.

Goldkind's research on technology adoption in social service organisations, digital equity, and the implications of AI for social work practice has positioned her as one of the field's most important voices on the future of the profession. Her framework for thinking about AI readiness, which examines not just technical capacity but organisational culture and ethical governance, has been adopted by a number of human services organisations as a starting point for planning.

48. Julie Dempsey

Julie Dempsey is a Principal Social Worker and practice development leader in the United Kingdom's children's services sector whose writing on child-centred practice, systemic approaches, and the role of the middle manager in social work has generated substantial practitioner engagement. She is an active contributor to the continuing professional development literature for social workers and a voice for the importance of practice-led leadership in children's services.

Dempsey's published reflections on what distinguishes practice-led from management-led supervision have contributed to national debates in England about how principal social workers exercise their professional leadership role in organisations dominated by performance metrics and risk-management frameworks. Her willingness to name these tensions publicly is valuable in a sector where frontline realities are often obscured in professional discourse.

49. Jocelyn Camayd-Freixas

Jocelyn Camayd-Freixas is a community development practitioner and researcher whose work at the intersection of immigration, social work, and community services in the United States has addressed the specific leadership challenges facing immigrant and refugee-serving organisations. His published work on macro social work practice offers practical frameworks for social workers operating at the policy and community organising level.

Camayd-Freixas's contributions to the macro social work field include research on how community development organisations navigate the intersection of service delivery and advocacy, and his writing challenges the field to develop leaders who can hold both roles simultaneously without defaulting to one or the other.

50. Kristy Muir

50. Wendy Glauser

Wendy Glauser is a Toronto-based social justice journalist and researcher whose writing on social work, community services, child welfare, and health equity has appeared in publications including The Guardian, The Globe and Mail, and CMAJ. She has become an important bridger between social work practice and public understanding of the sector's challenges, covering workforce conditions, funding failures, and institutional accountability in ways that amplify practitioner voices.

Glauser's investigative reporting on child welfare inequities in Canada, including the overrepresentation of Indigenous children in care, has contributed to public debate on systemic reform. Her journalism practises a form of community accountability reporting that social work academics describe as aligned with the profession's own values of advocacy and social justice.

Notable Voices We Almost Included

Several well-known names in broader leadership discourse sit at the edges of this list. Brene Brown, Adam Grant, and Simon Sinek would appear on most general leadership lists, and their work has reached many social workers. This list deliberately moved past these household names to surface voices whose work is embedded in the community services and social work field specifically. Among contemporary researchers, Marian Wright Edelman's work through the Children's Defense Fund has shaped child welfare advocacy for decades, but her public engagement has reduced significantly in recent years. Michael Lipsky's concept of street-level bureaucracy remains foundational to how social workers understand their role, but his active contribution to the current conversation sits primarily in how practitioners apply his ideas rather than in new work. The field is remarkably rich: this list of 50 barely scratches the surface of the people doing outstanding work globally, and anyone who engages seriously with even ten of these voices will find their way to dozens more.

Common Mistakes to Avoid When Following Social Work Thought Leaders

The first and most common mistake is consuming thought leadership passively without connecting it to the practice environment you actually work in. Reading a compelling argument for co-production or relational welfare is genuinely valuable, but the test is whether that reading changes how you supervise, how your organisation structures services, or how you advocate for resources. Content without application is entertainment, not professional development.

The second mistake is following only voices from your own country or region. Social work thought leadership is genuinely global, and some of the most generative ideas about community services leadership are emerging from contexts very different from the high-income Anglophone settings where most social workers in Australia, the US, and the UK operate. The task-shifting research from the Global South, the Harambee philosophy informing the 2026 World Conference, and the community development traditions in Latin America all offer perspectives that productively challenge assumptions embedded in your own practice.

The third mistake is conflating thought leadership with research evidence. A thinker can be genuinely influential without being right, and a researcher can produce solid evidence without communicating it in ways that reach practitioners. The best professional development draws on both, but distinguishes between them. Follow both practitioners who write and researchers who practise, and be explicit about which kind of voice you are drawing on when making practice or policy decisions.

The fourth mistake is treating sector thought leadership as primarily about self-improvement rather than sector advocacy. Social work's intellectual tradition is explicitly political. The voices in this directory are not simply offering better ways for individuals to practise. They are making arguments about how systems should change, how resources should be allocated, and how power should be redistributed. Engaging with them as merely professional development tips misses the point.

A fifth mistake, common among managers and leaders in community services organisations, is treating thought leadership consumption as a personal activity rather than an organisational one. The most effective leaders build cultures where ideas are shared, debated, and connected to practice. Distributing the content of what you are reading and following creates teams that are collectively more equipped to engage with the challenges of the sector.

Implementation Guide: Building Your Thought Leadership Practice

Start by identifying the three areas of community services or social work leadership where you most need to deepen your thinking. For most practitioners and managers, these will correspond to the most pressing challenges in their current role, whether that is workforce retention, trauma-informed practice, digital transformation, equity, or service model innovation. Use that framing to select five or six of the voices in this directory who are most specifically engaged with those areas.

Follow those individuals on LinkedIn or through their preferred publishing platforms, and do so actively rather than passively. Engage with what they post. Leave comments that add to the conversation rather than simply affirming it. The social work thought leadership ecosystem rewards reciprocal engagement, and many of the people in this directory are genuinely responsive to substantive professional engagement.

Set aside regular time, whether weekly or fortnightly, to read something outside your immediate practice area. The most interesting ideas in community services leadership increasingly come from the intersections between disciplines. The connection between AI ethics and social work values, between climate action and community resilience, between Indigenous knowledge systems and trauma-informed care, these cross-disciplinary conversations are producing the field's most generative thinking.

Bring what you are reading into team conversations deliberately. Ask your team whether they have encountered particular ideas or frameworks, and create space to discuss whether those ideas are relevant to your context. Building a learning culture in your organisation is itself a form of community services leadership.

If your organisation is working through leadership development, team alignment, or cultural transformation challenges, Jonno White delivers workshops and executive offsites that help leadership teams have the conversations they most need to have. Email jonno@consultclarity.org to discuss what your team needs.

Consider contributing to the conversation, not just consuming it. Social Work Week, professional association events, LinkedIn, and sector publications all offer opportunities for practitioners and managers to share what they are learning from practice. The voices that are most valued in the thought leadership ecosystem are those who write from the intersection of evidence and experience.

Frequently Asked Questions

How was this list compiled? Every person on this list was selected on three criteria: a substantive documented contribution to community services or social work leadership, current active engagement in the field, and a deliberate commitment to geographic and disciplinary diversity. The list prioritises voices who are actively publishing, speaking, or leading organisations in 2025 and 2026, and spans child welfare, community development, regulation, research, social enterprise, advocacy, mental health, and workforce development across North America, Europe, Australasia, Africa, and Asia.

Who are the most influential social work leaders in the world right now? Influence in social work leadership is genuinely distributed across geographies and practice areas. At the international governance level, Joachim Mumba as IFSW President and Antonio Lopez Pelaez as ICSW Executive Director are the most structurally powerful voices. At national regulatory levels, Isabelle Trowler and Sarah McClinton in England carry significant day-to-day influence. In research and practice innovation, voices like Jessica Pryce, Hilary Cottam, Lena Dominelli, and Sandra Bloom have generated the frameworks that practitioners and policymakers draw on.

What is the biggest challenge facing community services leadership today? The workforce crisis is the most immediate challenge, with burnout rates exceeding 70 per cent in some areas of social work practice and persistent shortages of experienced practitioners in roles that require sustained relationship-building. Beneath the workforce crisis sits a deeper structural challenge: community services are persistently underfunded relative to the complexity of need they address, creating a systemic mismatch between demand and capacity that no amount of individual leadership excellence can fully resolve without policy change.

How do I build a leadership career in social work or community services? The most consistent advice from community services leaders is to be intentional about building diverse experience, not just climbing a single organisational hierarchy. Move between direct practice and management, between organisational leadership and sector advocacy, between local and national roles. Build a habit of reflective practice and professional learning from early in your career. Engage actively with the profession's knowledge base rather than treating continuing education as a compliance requirement.

Can I hire someone to facilitate leadership development or team building for my community services organisation? Yes. Jonno White works with leadership teams in community services and nonprofits globally, delivering executive offsites, team workshops, and keynote presentations focused on communication, accountability, and team dynamics. He is a bestselling author and Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and his facilitation engagements can be delivered in person or virtually. Email jonno@consultclarity.org or visit consultclarity.org to discuss your organisation's needs.

What is transformational leadership in social work? Transformational leadership in social work refers to leadership approaches that focus on inspiring, motivating, and developing followers rather than managing task completion. In a social work context, it typically involves creating shared vision, developing the professional capabilities of the team, and building a culture in which practitioners feel supported to exercise professional judgement. Research on transformational leadership in social service organisations suggests it is associated with better staff retention, higher job satisfaction, and better outcomes for clients compared to more transactional management approaches.

How do I engage with social work thought leaders without it feeling performative? The most substantive engagement comes from connecting ideas to your actual practice dilemmas. When you read a framework or follow a voice that makes an argument, ask yourself specifically how that argument applies or does not apply to something you are currently dealing with. Write that response somewhere, whether in a reflective log, a LinkedIn comment, or a team discussion. That act of connecting idea to practice is what distinguishes learning from content consumption.

Final Thoughts

The 50 people in this directory represent a slice of the global conversation about what community services and social work leadership looks like at its best. They do not agree with each other on everything. The tension between relational practice and digital transformation, between anti-oppressive politics and evidence-based effectiveness, between professional regulation and community self-determination, is present across this list and it is productive. The fields that have strong competing voices tend to develop more robustly than those where consensus is assumed.

What the people in this directory share is a commitment to the idea that leadership in community services matters enormously and that it deserves serious, sustained attention. The sector works with people at the most vulnerable moments of their lives, in the most challenging institutional contexts, with chronic resource constraints and extraordinary emotional demands. The leaders who navigate that environment with integrity, rigour, and genuine commitment to the people they serve deserve to be known, followed, and supported.

Whether you are a social work practitioner looking to deepen your professional thinking, a manager building your team's capability, a commissioner designing services, or a funder trying to understand what leadership in the sector looks like, this directory is your starting point. Start with two or three names. Follow them for a month. See what changes in how you think about your work.

To discuss leadership facilitation, executive offsites, or keynote presentations for your community services or social sector team, email Jonno White at jonno@consultclarity.org. Jonno is a bestselling author of Step Up or Step Out, a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, and a trusted leadership facilitator who works globally. International travel is often more affordable than clients expect.

About the Author

Jonno White is a Certified Working Genius Facilitator, bestselling author, and leadership consultant who has worked with schools, corporates, and nonprofits around the world. His book Step Up or Step Out has sold over 10,000 copies globally, and his podcast The Leadership Conversations has featured 230+ episodes reaching listeners in 150+ countries. Jonno founded The 7 Questions Movement with 6,000+ participating leaders and achieved a 93.75% satisfaction rating for his Working Genius masterclass at the ASBA 2025 National Conference. Based in Brisbane, Australia, Jonno works globally and regularly travels for speaking and facilitation engagements. Organisations consistently find that international travel is far more affordable than expected.

To book Jonno for your next keynote, workshop, or facilitation session, email jonno@consultclarity.org.

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Keep reading: https://www.consultclarity.org/post/thought-leadership-nonprofits