Community Empowerment: Dimensions and Strategies
Dimensions of Empowerment
- Ability to live together: Intimate level, refers to the ability to coexist with our past, traumatic experiences, and positive relationships. In interaction with others, it refers to the ability to respect others.
- Authenticity: An authentic life is linked to personal history and consistency with firmly established values and beliefs.
- Cooperation and Altruism: The ability to relate in a united and free way, overcoming a reductionist view of personal well-being based on selfish interests.
- Capacity for Empathy: The ability to put oneself in the place of the person, group, or community with whom we communicate or share.
- Optimism: Reasonable joy and optimism based on will and an appropriate level of tolerance for frustration are indicators of an integrated personality.
Diagnosis of Community Action
The Dimensions of Empowerment
Community dynamics in social work cannot begin without a proper diagnosis of the community and the people involved. Often, we diagnose based on what we lack. However, a proper process of strengthening our capabilities should focus on the skills and potential of people, resources, and capacities available in the community. From there, we can restore, improve, or acquire other dimensions that we currently lack.
The community social worker should keep in mind three principles to properly manage the process of personal empowerment through community dynamics:
- Focus on Skills: The analysis should focus on the existing capabilities and virtues. Developing these can create a climate of change. Insisting only on deficiencies generates melancholy and passivity.
- Avoid Deficit-Based Concepts: Diagnoses should avoid using concepts that refer to shortcomings. Such concepts can make individuals feel worthless and marginalized. Instead, community social work should emphasize that all people have valuable abilities and skills.
- Pursue Reasonable Goals: Setting impossible goals is a clear predictor of stress. The social worker must establish short-, medium-, and long-term goals to assess achievements and create a positive experience of small changes that improve individual and collective confidence.
Real knowledge about ourselves and our communities is achieved by highlighting our capabilities and potential and setting goals that allow a process of change.
Community Empowerment
What is the ultimate goal of any intervention based on the methodology of community social work?
Achieving a self-organized community that uses its skills to face collective challenges, transforms its surroundings, and modifies its internal dynamics to facilitate the personal development of its members.
The leadership of the social worker is always temporary and is aimed at generating leadership capacity in the community. We must maintain a delicate balance between the power system, hierarchy, and authority as they operate in the community.