Recent police killings and related uprisings have cast a renewed spotlight on the role of social service systems and social workers to provide care-based alternatives to systems of punishment. Yet scholarship and practice reveal how punishment and oppression are entrenched in many ostensibly caring social service systems’ daily operations—including child welfare, healthcare, and violence prevention—creating challenges for social workers and allied change agents in dismantling punishment and building instead what Ruth Wilson Gilmore calls “life-affirming institutions.” This Conversations Across Social Disciplines event will facilitate interdisciplinary dialogue on change in and new models of social service systems, highlighting the challenges and opportunities in building life-affirming institutions that cultivate care, while also uncovering both the explicit and covert dangers in existing social service systems.