Co-Building Hope and Harmony: A Harambee Call to Unite a Divided Society
- Venkat Rao Pulla
Abstract
In response to the current conflict in the Middle East—marked by mass civilian suffering, displacement, and technologically mediated warfare—my message is to affirm social work’s sole allegiance to humanity and to reject ideological partisanship to which we may be drawn based on our state, allegiance, and nation. I draw on the philosophy of Harambee (“all pull together”). I see strengths-based practice as moral action: centring lived experience, protecting the most vulnerable despite political inconvenience, and resisting ethical paralysis amid institutional failure. I urge social workers globally to practice solidarity across borders, sustain collective care to counter moral injury, invest in the ethical formation of future practitioners, and collaborate across disciplines, cultures, and faiths. This is a global message to professional social workers, a call to act.
Keywords
Harambee, Middle East Conflict 2026, Social Work Ethics, Strengths-Based Practice , World Social Work Day
Author Biography
Venkat Rao Pulla
Professor Venkat Pulla, PhD, FAASW, is a distinguished social work scholar, educator, and practitioner with over four decades of leadership in social work education, research, and professional practice across Australia, the Asia‑Pacific, and the SAARC region. An alumnus of the Tata Institute of Social Sciences and recipient of the Tata Dorabji Merit Scholarship, he holds a PhD in Social Work from Karnatak University and is a Fellow of the Australian Association of Social Workers. He has held senior academic leadership roles, including Founding Head of Social Work at Northern Territory University (now Charles Darwin University), and has taught and supervised extensively across Australian universities. A prolific author and editor, his scholarship on strengths‑based practice, resilience, and ethical social work includes ‘Discrimination, Challenge, and Response (Palgrave Macmillan, 2020), with global recognition marked by the NAPSWI Lifetime Achievement Award (2015) and the Karma Veer Puraskar (2008).