Social workers play a central role in accompanying refugees toward social and financial independence. Each Italian diocesan Caritas branch has its own team of social workers, whose number and roles vary and depend on the choices and overall needs of their specific diocese.
To manage the Humanitarian Corridors project, each diocesan Caritas branch organized its teams very differently, largely depending on three factors: the number of social workers in the diocese, the number and specific needs of the asylum seekers, and the presence of local mentor families and/or volunteers. The number of social workers ranged from two to six, including specialized team members such as mediators, psychologists, social workers, and lawyers. Such figures were involved in a minority of cases, however. In fact, only three dioceses had psychologists, and the same number had social workers, and in most cases mediators were called in as external figures. Four or five dioceses had psychologists on their teams.
To raise awareness of the need for specialized social workers, Caritas Italiana has held national social worker formation days since 2019. These have focused particularly on psychology and ethnopsychiatry, with the aim of giving diocesan social workers the basic elements they need to recognize the symptoms of some of the most common mental health issues and disturbances common to migration and related trauma.
Social worker formation also served to put teams from different dioceses in touch with one another as they dealt with similar challenges relating to beneficiaries, given that in Italy it is very difficult to find ethnopsychiatrists and psychologists with specific training in the trauma of forced migration.
Given the enormous outpouring of energy and the high levels of personal involvement that people tend to put into working with migrants, the diocesan Caritas branches had to increasingly come to terms with the fact that they needed to provide support for their social workers in order for the social workers to be able, in turn, to effectively support the beneficiaries.
If the workload and emotional toll are not managed properly and shared with professionals, the social workers risk burnout. In the Humanitarian Corridors project, this risk was born out particularly when social workers were tasked with running the entire project on their own, or with only small teams. Two of them had this to say, in interviews they gave a few months after starting the hospitality project:
"You have to squeeze your life in, too – everything that was there before the project. [The project] just sucked me dry – it consumed me. Now, little by little the winds are dying down […]. At the beginning I was so busy, so […] I wasn’t really able to fit in friends, scouts, everything else, my family... Now, little by little I’m recovering. […] Would I do this project over again? Yes, but first I would find the volunteers, and maybe I would think about it somewhat…sooner. Then, yes, I would take better stock of the situation, have a better sense of my availability, because at the beginning it was a bit much […]. It got to be a bit too much in terms of emotional overload."
