The core purpose of The Self-Care Lab (SCL) is to generate empirical knowledge associated with broad-ranging self-care research, education, and training endeavors among helping professionals. SCL entails a unique, collaborative partnership among researchers in the College of Social Work, including the Training Resource Center, and faculty at institutions around world. Through these inimitable partnerships, SCL seeks to deploy a collaborative model that will improve the empirical knowledge base associated with professional and personal self-care for helping professionals.
Activities of the Self-Care Lab are rooted in the following tenets:
- Self-care is inherently linked to the quality of services provided by helping professionals, and is paramount to having a well-functioning workforce.
- Rigorous research and evaluation is pertinent to understanding self-care.
- Agencies/organizations desire to engage in adept self-care practices, yet may lack the knowledge, skills, and values to do so.
- Research about self-care is best rooted in a socio-ecological model that examines implications at individual, group, and organizational system levels.