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The organisation I am currently doing my professional placement is a non-for-profit organisation whose aim is to eliminate hunger in Australia. Our clients are usually people that are going through financial hardship and are facing food insecurity. To support them our program allows them to buy many of their basic food items at a substantially reduced rate from either the warehouse or from the community mobile pantry. Working in such an organisation requires one to abide by the principles, values, culture and guidelines it holds which eventually results in making choices by following moral commitments on any ethical situations which they encounter. In accordance to the statement made by Allen (2018), ethical dilemmas are the situations in which there is a choice to be made between two option, neither of which resolves the situation in an ethically acceptable fashion. Such experiences arise ethical dilemmas which as a humanitarian worker, one must be aware of the risks it involves while working directly with clients.

The procedure we follow to register our clients to the program itself poses as an ethical dilemma for me because it requires one to acquire personal information of the clients and then uploading it into the system which is easily accessible by my supervisor and other volunteers of the organisation. To serve our clients better, we engage with them to know about their background and hardships which we later discuss with our supervisor to come up with better community development plans. According to ACWA (2019), all the information concerning to clients must be strictly confidential and without the permission of the clients to disclose the information would be against the laws and code of ethics. To resolve such events, consent forms clearly mentioning policies and procedures of the organisation can be introduced to the clients. This will give the clients a clear view of how we use client information for the betterment of the clients. It will also allow them to choose whether to continue with the program or not.

References

Allen, K. (2018). What is an Ethical Dilemma?. The New Social Worker. Retrieved From: https://www.socialworker.com/featurearticles/ethicsarticles/What_Is_an_Ethical_Dilemma%3F/

Australian Community Workers Association (2019). Australian community workers ethics and good practice guide. Retrieved From: http://www.acwa.org.au/resources/ACWA-Ethics-and-good-practice-guide.pdf