2025 Speech at the Boston College School of Social Work Commencement

Commencement Speech delivered by Rachael Dietkus at the Boston College School of Social Work 2025 Commencement

May 19, 2025

Note: I had the great honor of being invited to deliver the commencement speech to the 2025 graduates at the Boston College School of Social Work. This speech was delivered on Monday, May 19, 2025. There are several hyphens placed throughout this, which signaled me to pause or slow down while speaking.

. . . 

Thank you, Dean Yadama. 

Good afternoon, everyone. What an honor it is to be with you today. To the graduates — our new social work peers and colleagues — congratulations! Getting to this point is truly extraordinary. I hope you are all beaming at this moment. You have earned it. Thank you to the friends, families, faculty, staff, mentors, and community members. Thank you for your encouragement, patience, quiet sacrifices, guidance, support, and the care that brought today to life. This is your day too.

So many people have helped me get to where I am today. A few of you are even here! Many are back home in Illinois. And some have passed on. All of us have special people who have cared and loved us into being. Before I talk about social work and design, would everyone just take 10 seconds to think of the people who have helped you become who you are – those who have cared about you and wanted what was best for you in life? Let’s take a quiet moment together… I’ll watch the time.

[10 seconds of silence observed]

Whoever you’ve been thinking about — what a joy it must be for them to know the difference they’ve made. They’re the kind of people social work so often, and quietly, cultivates. We’re lucky to live in a world shaped by people like them. And for the students, I hope — just maybe — you thought of yourself, too. Because the care, courage, and commitment it takes to be here today is no small thing.

. . . 

It was 15 years ago – almost to the day – that I attended my own MSW graduation. It’s hard not to think about that day and the many moments that led to it – working two jobs, taking a full course load, commuting 45 minutes to campus. Oh… and still serving on at least two committees for the school and as the president of the graduate social work association. But I have to say, I do not remember who the graduation speaker was. None of my social work friends could remember either. However, I also asked several friends and colleagues if they remembered their graduation speakers. And … nope. No one could remember them. Not a single one. And I couldn’t help but wonder if this was somehow by design — that what stays with us isn’t always the speaker or the ceremony, but the meaning we make around it. In the same way, the path we take as social workers — and as designers — often isn’t about a single moment, but the many small choices and decisions that shape how we show up.

Just like there are countless ways to practice as a social worker, there are also many ways to practice as a designer. My interest in design wasn’t accidental; I actually started as an art and design student before stumbling upon sociology and eventually finding my way to social work.

Design kept finding me in the ways I practiced as a social worker. When working at Veterans Affairs, I saw huge initiatives around systems thinking and systems redesign. We also made massive efforts to address veteran-centered care, which loosely integrated human-centered design and trauma-informed care. As a social worker who designs, I know this area of work is still emerging. When I founded Social Workers Who Design and started saying that I was both a social worker and designer, I found others with this shared interest, like Jess Obayan, a Boston College alumna and multidisciplinary social worker who is the Director of Creativity and Co-Design at Design Impact. 

By throwing out multiple hopeful signals — by talking about things like design thinking for social workers, why designers and public interest technologists need social workers working alongside them, and by writing and speaking about the many ways in which trauma impacts everything that has been designed and needs to be redesigned — I’ve been trying to imagine and invite others into a future where an ethic of care is not an afterthought, but a foundation that is living in our practice. I’m striving for a future where our disciplines don't just coexist, but we’ve created a new discipline to repair what’s broken and reimagine what’s possible through new openings, portals, and new roles of design, care, accountability, and possibility.

My commitment to social work, design, and examining the future of trauma is also how I became part of the Social Work Futures Lab. In this lab, I got to know another design thinking social worker, Dr. Samuel Bradley. And here is an example of how ripples can occur: a former student of his found me on LinkedIn two years ago and said: 

My professor is Dr. Samuel Bradley, and I'm taking a class he created a few years ago called ‘Dismantling Organizational Bias.’ We had his friend/colleague Chōkdee Rutirasiri come and speak to us regarding designing programs and initiatives. This field seems very interesting!”

. . . 

So, a lot can happen in 15 years. I never would have imagined my trajectory in social work – from working at the VA to my alma mater to the White House. For me, social work has always been about design. That may sound surprising — maybe even odd. But design, at its core, is about shaping conditions. It’s about how people experience services, systems, relationships, belonging, and mattering. And social workers — we do that — every single day. We design access. We design responses to crises. We design moments of trust, dignity, and repair.

Social workers are designers — whether we know it or not, regardless of anyone giving us that title. But let’s be honest: most systems weren’t designed by us. And from what I’ve seen up close, they weren’t and still aren’t built with the people most affected at the center.

They were built for efficiency, compliance, and control, not equity, healing, or justice. That’s why this moment matters, because we’re not just here to respond to more failed and broken systems. We have a role and responsibility to reimagine and redesign them. And that requires us to see design not as something separate from social work, but as a natural extension of it.

When I founded Social Workers Who Design, I wasn’t sure who would understand this intersection. But I knew we couldn’t keep pretending that services — especially digital ones — were helping people. Over the past several years, I’ve worked with government agencies, nonprofits, universities, and healthcare organizations, helping teams embed trauma-informed and care-centered design into their work. 

One example I return to often is my work supporting disaster recovery efforts. Now, this was part of President Biden’s efforts to improve the life experiences of the American people at some of the most critical moments in their lives. These projects included having a child, facing a financial shock, veterans navigating the transition to civilian life, approaching retirement, and recovering from a disaster. 

After a disaster, survivors are navigating so much — finding stable housing, securing basic needs, taking care of their families, and managing the complex emotional aftermath of what they’ve just been through. On top of that, they often face confusing, fragmented public systems that prevent them from accessing the assistance they need to recover.

When we spoke with disaster survivors to learn about their experiences, they told us something that stayed with me: they wanted to feel like someone actually cared. The way they were treated — the tone of a message, a confusing form, or the clarity of an application process — directly impacted their mental health, their trust in institutions, and even their long-term recovery. That’s design. Every interaction is an opportunity to affirm someone’s dignity — or diminish it. 

. . . 

Graduates, you’re entering a world of ongoing urgency and upheaval. It can feel overwhelming because it is overwhelming. But it’s also a world full of emergent possibilities. You’re not just stepping into jobs; you’re stepping into the kind of opportunities that don’t always come with a roadmap, but do come with incredible potential.

This is your invitation: to see yourselves not just as helpers and responders to crisis, but as designers of new systems, new futures, and new forms of care. You know harm. You’ve seen systems fail. And you’ve learned to hold complexity without turning away. That makes you an absolute force for transformation.

Within the next five years, and if you aren’t already, many of you will become directors, program leads, and decision-makers. With that comes the responsibility to model success differently, not by replicating old power structures, but by leading with clarity, courage, and respair — that quiet return of hope after despair. 

We often think of design as belonging to architects, product teams, or tech companies. But design belongs to all of us. And when social workers step into it with our values intact — with our understanding of trauma, power, and dignity — we don’t just make systems more efficient. We make them more humane. We ask different questions: Who might this harm? Who was left out? What does care require here? And that kind of design care and design justice is precisely what the world is starving for. 

. . . 

Before I close, I want to acknowledge something tender and true: We live in a time when it can be easy to give in to cynicism. I’ve felt it. Many of us have.

I recently came across a letter in his newsletter from musician and author Nick Cave, which gave me serious pause. He said: 

Unlike cynicism, hopefulness is hard-earned. It makes demands upon us, and can often feel like the most indefensible and lonely place on Earth. Hopefulness is not a neutral position either. It is adversarial. It is the warrior emotion that can lay waste to cynicism. Each redemptive or loving act … says that the world and its inhabitants have value and are worth defending. It says the world is worth believing in. In time, we come to find that it is so.

So if you find yourself slipping into the heaviness of hopelessness in the years ahead, I want you to remember this: a discipline of hope is not naive. It’s actually quite courageous. And every time you show up with care, ethics, and a future imagination, you’re saying that the world has value. People have value. Social work has value. 

. . . 

Here is my parting charge to you, graduates: Be the social worker who designs. Design for safety. Design for repair. Design for futures rooted in an ethic of care. Challenge all of the defaults. Question the status quo. Ask the better questions. Don’t wait for permission to bring yourself into the room. Use design, care, and ethics as your methods of resistance and as your tools for building other tomorrows.

Congratulations, Class of 2025! May you help design a future that is more just, more humane, and more whole. Thank you.