Social care has a lengthy global history, although social work as a discipline has a more limited history, with roots primarily in the Anglophone North Atlantic. Climate change and sustainability, COVID-19 and other pandemics, refugees and migrants, and the extreme inequality gap between the very wealthy and the very poor are among the urgent issues that highlight contemporary global interconnectedness and the challenges faced by the twenty-first century social workers. Social workers can address these global challenges adequately and competently only if we are part of a global discipline whose practitioners, educators, and researchers are clear about what unique knowledges and skills we bring to the issues. In order to address these issues, social workers must do four things: have a clear understanding of the history of social care; actively decolonise our practice and research, not merely in post-colonial nations, but in former colonising nations; decide whether or how social cohesion, empowerment, and liberation can co-exist as goals including the tension between social cohesion and emancipation; and decide whether we wish to construct our discipline as a profession, and the implications of that decision. Only then can we prepare for a global future for our discipline.