Dimensions of Power and Community Empowerment in Social Work
1.1. Dimensions of Power: The Virtuous Circle of Empowerment
Human societies have an internal dynamic towards stratification and asymmetrical distribution of resources and opportunities. The momentum towards democracy, from the principle of citizenship, aims to alter such processes to build a societal model that recognizes us as free citizens with equal dignity.
Power and the capacity to exercise it are basic features of human life. We can distinguish four dimensions or types of power:
1. Power Over
This is the ability to control something or someone. Increased power for one subject involves a loss of power for another. Objectification of others, reality, and nature leads to a relationship based on dominance and competition.
2. Power To
This refers to the power some people have to encourage agency, self-esteem, and knowledge in those they interact with. It’s a relationship where power doesn’t involve coercion and provides autonomous subjects who respond to stimuli based on belief, information, and motivation.
3. Power With
This refers to power-sharing generated and maintained within a community. It implies a capacity for dialogue, empathy, community mechanisms to resolve issues, make decisions, and establish common goals.
4. Internal Power
This refers to developing a balanced personality with self-confidence and a healthy level of self-esteem. This isn’t achievable through individual reflection alone but is acquired by dealing with others, learning to share experiences, reaching agreements, and maintaining reasonable disagreements while ultimately taking joint action. Loyalty, cooperation, and commitment, key issues for maintaining strong social relationships and increasing social capital, are indicators of community cohesion in a given social environment.
1.2. Between the Individual and the Community: Guidelines for the Community Social Worker
The community social worker practices in projects that address structural challenges requiring mobilization or community action. Here are some basic guidelines for personal development within community social work dynamics:
1. Community Development Rooted Within the Person
Although our model may internalize life patterns that reinforce exclusion and gender inequalities, we can objectify our circumstances and establish a process of change. The community social worker should generate momentum for meeting and cooperation, enabling each participant to overcome fears and feelings of separation or isolation, strengthening their confidence in collective action and establishing positive relationships.
2. Fostering a Sense of Belonging
For each person to overcome isolation and participate, a sense of belonging and bonding favors agreement and cooperation. The social worker must establish trust-based relationships within the community, allowing for frank dialogue, a preliminary step to identifying problems and solutions.
Elements of Empowerment as Process and Outcome
What elements are involved in empowerment as both a process and outcome?
- Developing a more positive self-concept, where individuals recognize their abilities and potential, moving away from passive interpretations of events.
- Promoting a critical and analytical understanding of social, political, economic, and cultural contexts, a prerequisite for designing successful community action.
- Developing collective resources for social and political action, aiming for the liberation of those lacking power within a particular social environment.
3. Creating Self-Realizing Communities
The community social worker seeks to create communities that allow for the self-realization of their members while equipping them to meet challenges. This approach doesn’t separate the person from the community but works with both in a relationship of mutual involvement and strengthening. Personal change can be a bridge for community solidarity, and vice versa.
4. The Importance of Interpersonal Relationships
Relationships between individuals and communities don’t occur in a vacuum but are generated in an environment characterized by interpersonal relationships. Any community dynamic begins as a group dynamic. The social worker should create groups within the community and act as a facilitator, distributing tasks, encouraging collaboration, utilizing individual capabilities, and promoting the progressive self-organization of the community.
4. Values, Citizenship, and Social Work: Community as a Subject of Collective Action
Introduction
An ethical view that does justice to our nature must confront the limitations of postmodern individualism. We develop in interaction with others; we are not autonomous entities relating solely through rational expectations in a neutral environment.
In the complex relationship between identity and difference, we can identify three important aspects:
- We are not alone: Our identity is built on relationships with others.
- Relationships are essential: Our connection with others, what unites and differentiates us, is essential for our identity. Encounter, communication, and interaction are prerequisites to being ourselves.
- Difference arises from dialogue: Difference emerges from the critical dialogue between our personal journey, our interactions with others, and our socio-economic and cultural environment.
Therefore, we can establish an emancipation strategy in community social work based on these principles:
- Historical context: We are situated in a historical context that both constrains and enables us.
- Cultural contextualization: We are immersed in a culture that we can describe and analyze because we have the reflective capacity to analyze ourselves.
- Community achievement: To fulfill ourselves in interaction with others, we can analyze the problems and opportunities created by the logic that articulates our relationships and the constraints imposed by a particular conception of the person and the community.
Authentic personal self-determination can only be achieved by entering into committed relationships, meeting, and reciprocity with others.