Community Social Work: Prioritizing Risks and Action
Prioritizing Risks in Community Social Work
When engaging in community social work, it’s crucial to prioritize risks effectively. This involves considering:
- The objectives of the institution and how it finances its activities.
- The risks that are priorities for the population.
- A critical analysis based on results obtained through a valid methodology.
Whichever set of risks is prioritized, a key issue in all interventions is empowering people to integrate into a draft community action plan. Given the density level of community relations, the caseworker must develop an initial training program. This program should enable all participants to make a common diagnosis integrated into the community. It should also help them create and improve their relationship skills to dialogue, reach agreements, and properly analyze the environment and opportunities in both public and private institutions. Empowerment is central to achieving adequate community mobilization, ensuring it is not depleted in the first conflicts that arise or in relation to difficulties in achieving the proposed objectives.
Organizing Risks for Community Action
Once a set of risks has been identified for addressing through community dynamics, the next step is to organize them according to their importance. This guides our efforts and limited resources towards the most relevant and dangerous risks to the population. The following criteria can help sort the debate within the community and develop strategies accepted by the institutions on which the project depends:
- Objective Importance of Risk: Characteristics of the risk and its impact on the living conditions of the population.
- Dimensions of Risk: The more you can specify the dimension of risk that may be approached from the community, the more important it is. Conversely, if the risk is beyond our scope for action (e.g., climate change), it is less important from a community social work standpoint.
- Number of Persons Affected: The greater the number of people covered, the greater its importance. The more focused you are on an age group, the greater its importance.
- Programs for the Prevention of Risk: If the risk is already being addressed by institutions or organizations, it is of lesser importance. If it has not been considered and there is no program to deal with it, it is more important, as it can develop more quickly.
- Perception by the Population: If the risk is clearly perceived by the community and acted upon formally or informally, its importance is minor. If people are unaware of the risk, its importance is greater because it can expand rapidly, becoming a feature of the apparent social normalcy in the area.
Ongoing Community: Progress and Challenges
At this stage, the social worker and the persons serving the community face the challenges of diagnosis through community action:
- Tasks are distributed from a participatory perspective, considering each person’s skills, competencies, and capabilities. Differentiate between activities related to promoting exchange, communication, and problem-solving within the community and those related to mobilization and pressure on institutions.
- Establish a calendar of activities and objectives for both community action and mobilization, representation, and negotiation with other institutions.
- Provide space and time for gathering, analysis, and discussion among focus groups and the entire population, if possible, in a community assembly. Note that with increasing intervention duration, public assessment mechanisms, role redistribution, and contrasting opinions become more necessary.
- The social worker should gradually give way to the community’s self-organization, moving away from a leadership position as communication skills, cohesion, organization, and community mobilization reach maturity.