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This chapter offers community orientation as a template for radical and anti-oppressive practice, that is, practice that takes account of context and works in a relationship-based and partnered way with people in the communities where they live and go about their lives. In doing so, it proposes that such practice offers an effective bridge between critical and radical social work as a critique of social policy and actual practice in real-life situations found in the mainstream of social work, including statutory settings. It introduces the concepts of community orientation and generalism that underpin the individual practice that is essential in community social work and makes brief mention of the important theoretical contributions of Freire and Gramsci in their development of critical pedagogy.
Climate change is no longer a contention of some in the scientific community but a fact accepted by governments internationally. It is manifested in many different ways, though mostly through the manner in which human actions are impacting the environment. This chapter looks at this from a community social work perspective and suggests that this social work model is well placed to be practised in a way that can help disadvantaged communities deal with the consequences of climate change, from floods, storms, wildfires and paralysing snowfalls to the inward migration of displaced people. While traditional social workers might be deployed to respond in the wake of a disaster, workers already embedded in the community might offer more through their networking and local knowledge. They are also well placed to help build resilience through the preventative and proactive approaches that are essential components of community social work.
As a core chapter of the book, this chapter outlines a model of how to build community social work as a planned and concerted team approach. It assumes that this will be done on a pilot/test-of-change basis by the public sector organisation that organises social services in the area concerned. While emphasising that this involves non-prescriptive but locally conditioned top-down enabling and bottom-up building, it offers a systematic approach to planning and executing a model that should fit most situations, whether involving a geographical neighbourhood or a dispersed community of interest, such as an ethnically minoritised group.
This chapter, providing an example of community-orientated practice from England, looks at the impact that one social worker from Wiltshire has made on social work practice with Gypsy and Traveller communities. Chris Kidd is a social worker in a child safeguarding team, and as well as influencing the practice approach of his colleagues, he has also influenced interagency policy and practice across his county and ensured that voices from the communities concerned have been heard and heeded.
Arguably, social work education, in terms of both its classroom teaching and practice placements, is the place where future practitioners’ values, understandings and approaches to their practice are formed. Its influence on the whole of the social work profession should therefore not be underestimated. This chapter briefly explores the origins of social work education, its role in the framing of the social work profession, the relevance of regulation and some of the challenges that social work educators face. This helps explain why it is that community social work (CSW) is not widely taught as a core approach to social work practice in the UK. The chapter goes on to consider how embedding pedagogical practices that promote CSW is possible in social work education, even within the restrictions of the neoliberal university.
This final chapter of the book summarises the substantive content and offers basic guides, in accessible tabular form, to the separate but connected thrusts of community orientation and community social work (CSW). It ends with some personal reflections of the principal author, contending that it is a case not of whether CSW is affordable but whether we can afford not to move in this direction if social work is to have a sustainable and worthwhile future.
This chapter provides an overview of community social work’s (CSW’s) origins in the post-war development of social work in the UK and how it rose briefly and unsuccessfully to prominence and then disappeared in the marketisation and focus on crisis-led services that predominated from the 1990s onwards. The chapter argues that the move away from its key role in prevention and place within communities has harmed social work and reduced its support role for people in need. It critically contends that the third sector has moved into much of the space formerly occupied by local-authority-provided social services and that, as a result of the attendant funding mechanisms, this sector no longer offers the campaigning challenge to government and policy makers that it once did. Finally, the chapter suggests that the recent COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that locally organised services have strengths and potential that could be realised through CSW approaches.
The introduction lays out the premise of the book, explaining its origins and purpose, locating community social work in both social work history and the present and future context in the UK. It describes and discusses the key concepts of community that are used in the rest of the book, the book’s layout and the content of each chapter.
Chapters 5-8 of the book focus on examples of community-orientated and community social work practice from across the UK – with at least one from each of the four nations. This chapter summarises findings from these quite different examples and examines common denominators that might aid initiatives in the future. Differences in emergence and explanations for these are also offered for discussion. A prime purpose of the chapter is to draw lessons that might aid grounding and sustainability.
This chapter describes an example from Derry, Northern Ireland, where social work staff in a multi-disciplinary general practitioner practice-based team adopted community development approaches to their support work with vulnerable patients. To develop this, they partnered with a social enterprise set up to provide therapeutic activities whose participants were encouraged to take ownership and set their own goals. Activities ranged from those that were artistic and exercise based to the establishment of a community allotment. Formal evaluation was undertaken through the local university, demonstrating the value of the approaches taken. The success of the initiative rested on local networks and knowledge.
