What Mushrooms Taught Me About My Journey Through Social Work
Dylan Rackley, Bachelor of Social Work student, Griffith University. 29/07/2026
The Beginning Of an Idea from a mistake
The first time I helped build a community group from scratch as part of the foundational team, it fell apart before it really began.
It was a fairly dramatic descent into chaos, as one would expect under the circumstances. But I realise now that the idea was dead long before that descent. It was never really done right. We were a group of people who came together around a shared idea, all of us carrying different notions about what we were actually building and why. Nobody had sat down and agreed on what we wanted to achieve, or how we would work together to get there. So everybody's idea felt equally valid, and equally urgent. Arguments became personal. The group split, and out of the wreckage a much more hierarchical structure formed instead, because at least that gave people something to hold onto.
That new structure had its own problem. One person ended up running the show, and every decision moved through them. It caused exactly the kind of resentment and stagnation you would expect, and that organisation folded too.
Two very different failures. Same root cause. In both cases the visible activity was happening with nothing underneath it, and nothing underneath it meant nothing to hold it steady when the pressure came.
That is the lesson I keep coming back to, and it turned out not to be a lesson about committees at all.
A way of thinking, but made of what?
Around the same time, I was partway through my social work degree and stuck on a question that seemed like it should have been simple. What does a social worker actually do, moment to moment, in the room?
The closest thing to a cohesive answer I could find was that social work is a way of thinking while approaching a problem or a challenge. Which is true, and I still think it is true. But it is not an account of anything. It does not tell you what that way of thinking is made of, or how you would know whether you were doing it well.
Everything else came in pieces. Theories, frameworks, models, reading lists. The profession teaches attachment theory and intersectionality and motivational interviewing, and practitioners genuinely know this material. What is largely missing is a shared language for how those pieces relate to each other — which one is doing what job, and what has to be in place before another can work at all. Skilled practitioners hold that relationship intuitively. They just have not been given a way to say it out loud, which means it cannot be taught, examined, or handed on.
So I started building my own answer. That was in 2024, and it became the Mycelial Network: five layers, eighteen theoretical perspectives, and a set of commitments underneath the whole thing that I have named the Relational-Ecological Practice Ontology.
A framework for the practitioner, not a technique for the client
Before I go any further, I want to be clear about something, because people who have read the framework in depth have still occasionally misread it.
The Mycelial Network is not a technique I perform on a client. It is not a checklist or an intervention I run through to fix someone. It is a guidance system for the practitioner. It shapes how I show up, how I reflect, and how I hold myself in the room. It governs me, not the person sitting across from me. The goal was never to change who a client is. It is to work alongside them toward what they want, need, or are trying to change in the conditions of their own life.
Testing it before it had a name
About a year into developing it, in 2025, I helped form a new community group for the LGBTIQA+ community. Same starting conditions as that first failure: a handful of people with a shared idea and no shared structure yet.
This time my first move was not to start doing the work. It was to get the group to agree on our goals and our governance before we even called ourselves a committee. That buy-in, secured before anything was formalised, was the whole thing. It meant nobody's individual vision could quietly become the group's default.
I was working at two levels at once, thinking about the committee and the wider community as a whole, and sitting one-on-one with each volunteer to understand what they individually needed and brought. It was not an experiment. It was a growth period, for the group and for me.
Part of that growth meant reckoning with who I am inside that community. I am trans, and I am pansexual, and both of those identities create friction within some of the very spaces I was trying to help build. A significant part of the early work was self-reflective: understanding where I stood, and where my own goals and the community's goals lined up or pulled apart.
If I am honest about the metaphor, it was not that I field-tested a theory. The field tested me. The Mycelial Network was not built. It was grown, out of my experience in that community.
None of which is to minimise the work that group did. The people in it brought real skill and commitment, and that would have been true regardless of any structure I put underneath it. The point is how much further that same collaborative energy travels when a flexible system is holding the space, instead of every individual having to hold it alone.
Where mushrooms came in
Somewhere in that process I went looking for a metaphor. I needed something that could hold what I was noticing, and something flexible enough that the framework would not collapse the moment it met a context I had not anticipated.
Fungal networks kept coming back to me. A mycelial network is one thing and ten thousand things at once: thousands of strains, all still fungi, all still the same underlying phenomenon, but each one showing up differently depending on the ground it grew in. Underneath a forest floor, it is the connective tissue nobody sees, moving nutrients between organisms that appear to be standing entirely alone. That felt right. A framework coherent at its core but shaped by whoever is practising it and whoever they are working with.
The architecture, layer by layer
The framework sits in layers, like the ecosystem it is named for.
At the very base is what I think of as the subsoil. This is the foundational, deeply personal layer, where I have to know who I am as a practitioner, where I stand in relation to the people I work with, and how honestly I am prepared to look at my own judgments. Nothing above it holds if this is skipped.
Above that is the topsoil, the nutrient bed. This is where I read the world someone is standing in, the power and history operating around them, and the structural conditions producing what I am seeing in front of me.
Out of that soil come the roots: how a person has actually grown into who they are, and the patterns of connection and adaptation they carry with them. This is what social work already calls attachment and ecological systems theory.
Then the mycelial threads, the practical posture I bring into the room while I am getting to know someone. Not a one-off assessment I run and file away, but something ongoing. Noticing what is already working for a person. Creating room for them to learn through real experience rather than instruction. Holding all of it carefully enough not to reopen anything.
And finally the mushrooms, the visible part, the actual technique or conversation in the moment. Which one I reach for, and how I use it, depends entirely on everything underneath it. It is not a grab-bag of tools I default to. The same technique can need a completely different lens depending on what the soil and the roots are telling me, and when something is not landing, the answer is usually not to abandon it but to hold it differently.
That is the argument the whole framework rests on: the visible work is only as good as what is beneath it. Which is exactly what those two failed community groups taught me, several years before I had any language for it.
Where I have landed
I am not claiming the Mycelial Network would have saved that first group. What I am saying is that the person I am now, having lived through both of those failures, brings a steadier hand to situations like that one.
And the second group did not succeed because I was in it. It succeeded because good practice was allowed to work without anyone getting in its way, mine included.
Which is why I eventually resigned from it. Not because it stopped working, but because staying would have made it depend on me. Good structure does not need a permanent hand on the wheel, and a practitioner whose presence has become load-bearing has stopped being useful and started being necessary — and those are not the same thing. My own obsolescence, the group no longer needing me there, was the clearest evidence I had that the structure itself was doing its job.
I am still building this framework and still testing it, and I am heading into a field placement in the second half of 2026 where it will be put to work far more formally than anything I have described here. This piece is the beginning of writing that thinking out loud, publicly, while it continues to grow.
