When Cheryl A. Hyde learned she’d been named the 2025 recipient of the Association for Community Organization and Social Action’s (ACOSA) Career Achievement Award, her first reaction was simple: surprise.

“It was a very nice surprise,” Hyde said. “It’s always been a real home for me… these are the folks who are really committed to community practice and social change. They’re like my people.”

For Hyde, the honor is meaningful not only because she has been part of ACOSA for decades—since her days as a doctoral student—but because it reflects work that isn’t always as visible in the popular understanding of social work. While many people picture social workers as clinicians, Hyde’s focus is in the “macro” realm: the community, organizational, and policy-level work that shapes what happens on the ground.

“Community practice… is really about how can we partner with and support communities—geographic, identity, whatever—to reach their full potential,” she said. “A lot of the really exciting work is there.”

A professor in the School of Social Work and chair of the Macro Specialization, Hyde’s scholarship spans anti-oppressive praxis, community and organizational engagement and transformation, social movements and societal change, and macro practice ethics. She is co-author of Empowering Workers and Clients for Organizational Change, has published widely, and serves as editor-in-chief of the Journal of Community Practice.

But Hyde doesn’t describe her work as a list of titles. She describes it as learning how to earn trust, how to measure progress realistically, and how to avoid the traps that derail well-intentioned efforts.

One common breakdown, she said, is “savior syndrome”—when people show up believing they’re the only ones with answers. Another is what happens when projects become frustrating and messy: “Watching the wheels come off the train,” as she put it, can wear people down, especially when change comes in small steps.

And then there’s the reality of institutional baggage. When students or faculty enter a neighborhood as representatives of a university, communities respond to the history of the institution they represent—positive or negative. “You have to really put in a lot of work on building relationships before you can even talk about what it is you’re going to do together,” Hyde said.

That belief is central to her current work as co-principal investigator and evaluation director for the SAMHSA-funded Philadelphia ReCAST Initiative, which addresses community violence and trauma through grassroots efforts across Philadelphia neighborhoods. Through that work, Hyde has seen the difference between large, traditional agencies and smaller community-rooted groups.

“We track what the grassroots groups are doing,” she said. “It might just be 20 kids here and 50 kids there, but over the span, it’s really impressive.”

Hyde and her colleagues have been developing what she calls an “emergent model of violence mitigation,” based on lessons from dozens of grassroots groups—an approach grounded in what communities are already doing, rather than what outsiders assume they need.

After 21 years at Temple, Hyde says she hopes students carry forward “a curiosity and a passion to do right in the world,” along with a commitment to justice. Her advice for early-career social workers is characteristically direct: “Stay flexible, stay curious—and unionize your workplace.”