Training is an important component of the PAP. Ever since the Ministry of Welfare and Social Services adopted the paradigm, I and my team of excellent graduate students have developed dozens of courses on the PAP for different audiences – from practitioners in various roles, to managers and directors of social services departments and supervisors at the ministry. This chapter builds on this experience. It is based on a lecture that was presented at an international seminar on the PAP in June 2018 at Ben-Gurion University.

The first and most challenging course that I taught during the year that the Ministry of Welfare and Social Services seconded me from the university was a course that trained social workers to work in new programmes that targeted families whose children were considered to be at risk. It was a very intensive course, as well as the first to integrate the PAP and the topic of children at risk. I felt like I was being watched by my colleagues from the ministry, who anxiously wanted – and needed – the new programmes and training to succeed. The social workers in the class did not know one another. They came from all over the country, did not like travelling to the course and did not like the idea of someone from academia offering them the knowledge they needed for practice. They were also doubtful about the relevance of learning about poverty to their practice with parents who abuse and neglect their children.

The first day of the course dealt with the questions of what poverty is and why it is relevant for social work practice. I started with an introductory exercise in which I asked everyone to tell the group about a memory that had to do with poverty – it could be an ongoing encounter, personal or family experience, or even a one-time encounter with a stranger, even with a beggar. The stories that arise are always moving, and I see them as a repository of poverty themes, containing both the content of what poverty is and emotions that reveal the positions that people take vis-a-vis poverty. On the board, I wrote the name of the narrator, a few words on the main subject of their story and the dominant emotion that they described.