SWAA #RadChat:
What now? A post-election discussion for radical social workers

December 1, 2026
7:00 – 8:30pm Eastern Time (US & Canada)

Organized by the Social Welfare Action Alliance (SWAA)

With the conclusion of the midterm elections, we will have a very different political makeup nationally and locally depending upon what state you live in. We will analyze the results of the midterm elections and discuss the opportunities we now have to make an impact on the critical issues we care about, and how we can achieve results. It is critical that we, as radical social workers and others engaged with the human service system in the United States consider the implications that these results have for our practice and activism in these sectors, and how this might influence the prospects of both limiting the damage that the current authoritarian government is causing in the short-term, while laying the groundwork for more fundamental change to the existing political-economic order over the long-term.

#RadChat Co-Hosts:

Larry Bresler is the Executive Director of the Organize! Ohio, an organization that advances grassroots community organizing and assists community organizing efforts as a strategy for progressive change in Ohio. He has a Master’s Degree in Social Work from Case Western Reserve and a Law Degree from Cleveland State University. He has over 50 years’ experience community organizing, and advocacy primarily focused on issues of poverty. He also has served as an adjunct professor at the Case Western Reserve University School of Applied Social Sciences since 2006 where taught a wide range of classes relating to macro practice and poverty.

Stephen Monroe Tomczak is a professor at the Southern Connecticut State University School of Social Work, where he teaches courses in social welfare and community organization from an historical perspective. He holds an M.S.W. degree from the University of Connecticut and a Ph.D. in social policy from Brandeis University. Tomczak is a SWAA National Steering Committee Member and President of the Social Welfare History Group, and is a former chapter president of his faculty union, SCSU-AAUP.

SWAA is funded only through memberships. These help us to maintain our website and Zoom accounts and offer honorariums to webinar hosts.