The Unsung Advocate: Indira Brevick and the Art of Bearing Witness

There is a particular kind of person who finds their way to social work not through youthful idealism but through a slow accumulation of dissatisfactions, a sense that something essential is missing from the orderly, productive world of spreadsheets and performance reviews. Indira Brevick was such a person. For years, she worked in human resources, a field that promised to be about people but somehow wasn't, not really. The work was competent, professional, necessary, and hollow. She knew the mechanics of organizational life but felt herself standing at a great distance from the actual substance of human struggle and resilience.

Then she met social workers. Not in any dramatic encounter, but in the ordinary course of professional overlap, and what struck her was the sheer range of what they did. Social work, she discovered, was not a single thing but a constellation of possibilities: child protection, mental health, eldercare, adoption, community organizing. It was a profession defined not by narrow expertise but by a fundamental orientation toward human need in all its variety. She went back to school for her MSW, and in doing so, she didn't so much change careers as finally inhabit one that felt true.

That was twenty-five years ago. Today, Brevick works at the Atlanta VA healthcare system, where she has spent recent years focused on a population that exists in the peculiar shadowland of healthcare: the caregivers of veterans. These are the spouses, adult children, siblings, and friends who provide the daily, exhausting, invisible labor that keeps veterans at home rather than in institutions. They lift and bathe and medicate and monitor. They wake in the night to check breathing, manage crises, absorb rage and confusion and despair. They do this without training, often without recognition, and almost always without adequate support.

Brevick came to the caregiver support program in 2020, and it re-sparked something in her that had perhaps begun to dim. She had worked in children's protective services, in adult daycare, in adoption and mental health. Each field had its own particular sorrows and satisfactions. But the caregiver work felt different. "These are the unsung heroes," she says, and means it not as platitude but as precise description. What she witnessed, again and again, was people who felt overwhelmed and unrecognized, who were doing essential work that no one quite saw. And what she discovered was that simple recognition (the act of bearing witness to what someone is carrying) could shift something fundamental in how they experienced their burden.

This is the part of social work that cannot be taught in graduate school, the part that is learned only through years of sitting with people in their actual lives. Brevick is adamant about this when she talks to new social workers: learn everything you can, yes, but understand that much of what matters cannot be anticipated. Get involved in projects, research, groups, events. Try different things. The profession is too various, human need too unpredictable, for any single training to suffice. You find your niche not by planning but by exposure, by allowing yourself to be surprised by what calls to you.

Over time, Brevick's sense of purpose has evolved in a way that often happens to people who stay long enough in a profession to see its patterns. She still does the direct work (the assessments, the referrals, the crisis interventions) but increasingly she finds meaning in helping her peers and coworkers find fulfillment in their own social work careers. It is a kind of meta-caregiving, this attention to the sustainability of care itself. Every day, she says, she is re-energized by supporting others in finding their niche within the profession. It is as if she has become a caregiver to caregivers, which is to say, she has understood that the work cannot continue unless those who do it are themselves sustained.

When you ask Brevick what being a social worker means, she doesn't reach for the language of credentials or interventions or evidence-based practice. Instead, she talks about empathy, resourcefulness, openness. Social work, she says, is about providing advocacy, support, resources, or simply a listening ear. It is more than a calling (that word suggests something rarefied and exceptional). For Brevick, social work is fundamentally about being human. It is about not having all the answers, which is to say, it is about being willing to sit with people in their uncertainty rather than rushing to impose solutions.

This is not fashionable to say in an era increasingly obsessed with metrics, outcomes, and technological efficiency. The VA, like all large healthcare systems, is moving toward more digital interfaces, more automated processes, more measurable interventions. Brevick is not a Luddite. She understands the necessity of these systems, their capacity to extend services and track needs. But she worries about what gets lost in the translation. She hopes that future social workers will keep the human part alive in healthcare, will remember that the most important moments are often the ones that can't be measured: the personal, interpersonal exchanges that communicate to another person that they are seen, that their struggle matters, that they are not alone.

How does one maintain this humanity in systems that increasingly seem designed to eliminate it? Brevick's answer is deceptively simple: make a conscious effort to think of the person and be as human as possible in your interactions. It sounds obvious, but in practice it is radical. It means resisting the pressure to process people efficiently, to reduce them to problems and interventions. It means allowing space for the inefficient, unmeasurable work of connection.

For veterans and their caregivers navigating the vast bureaucracy of the VA system, Brevick offers practical guidance: start with caregiver.va.gov, where caregivers can find support programs designed to help keep veterans at home as long as possible. The person being cared for must be a veteran to qualify, but the resources available can make an enormous difference. She emphasizes this not as someone selling a program but as someone who has seen what happens when caregivers try to carry their burden alone, and what becomes possible when they don't have to.

There is something both modest and profound about Brevick's vision of her work. She is not claiming to save lives or transform systems. She is claiming something more difficult: that sustained attention to individual human beings, in all their particularity and need, is itself a form of resistance to the forces that would make healthcare merely efficient rather than genuinely caring. After twenty-five years, she has learned that social work is not about having answers but about being willing to stay present with questions, not about solving people but about seeing them.