Community & Social Work: Organizational Intervention Levels
Community Work and Social Work
There are important ambiguities in this respect:
- Social Work views Community Work as one of its three traditional methods of intervention. For Social Work cases, the Social Work and Community Work Group would be the methodological triad around which to build the professional exercise. Compared to the first two methods, which addressed the treatment of personal social situations, community work addresses collective social situations.
- We note the existence of a common repertoire. The various methods are given by the fact of operating within the same field (which sets common goals for the proximity of actors) and the common logic that provides the scientific process and rational action.
- The common repertoire should not lead to confusing community work with other approaches, forgetting their nuclear content and differentiating factors (in the case of community work, it is to create and/or support organizations to drive action).
- The fact that social work has distinguished between types of approach taken and the methods we have qualified for states worthwhile being able to recognize their differences; these three singularities are irreducible to one another.
Beyond the fact of dealing with the same generic object (social relations of marginalization-integration) and beyond the scientific guidance that all professionals presume, community work, social work groups, and cases are unique strategies that contribute to building social situations or environments of interaction that are known and for which intervention is also unique.
The so-called community plans since the late nineties in Catalonia are facilitating the opening of a new space practice focused on community work.
A Practice in Continuous Organizational Levels of Intervention
Traditionally, community work has been assigned a unique interest in local development, and this has led to thinking of the neighborhood or in localities more or less reduced as natural areas of development.
However, understanding community work as a practice of social organization allows us to understand that it may develop at very different levels:
- At the local level, of course.
- But also through the practice of federation or coalition at the regional, national, and even international levels, and so on.
The current development of information technologies and communication (ICT) offers the possibility of building communities through the Internet network, which obviously are not subject to territorial proximity.
Similarly, community work may develop at the level of specific groups as part of intervention strategies against exclusion and seek to alleviate or prevent social problems that particularly affect them (the struggle against oppression of women, against poverty, unemployment, drugs, etc.).
The practice of community work must locate, therefore, in a continuum of levels of intervention to connect the micro-level development (strengthening individuals, collectives, and groups) with the meso-social level (district, locality) and the macro level (national and international).