Empowering Communities: Organizational Practices in Social Intervention
Empowering Communities Through Organizational Practices
1. A Practice for Engaging Organizational Populations in Improving Their Living Conditions
Community Work must be differentiated from other practices that do not have the organizational hub of the population or the formation of a group around a Community Work comunitario. The project builds on the concept of self; without an autonomous collective subject, one cannot talk about Community Work comunitaria. The action or actions that professionals in social intervention develop around the same or similar problems can be very varied and, in fact, are. Sometimes these practices have markedly different characteristics in terms of philosophy, objectives, methods, time management, results, etc. The authors B. Dumas and M. Continued to believe that social intervention is presented with two strategies that must be differentiated. Both strategies rely on the creation of new organizations, but the difference is that the first one (modification of the institutional), through partner-based committees, strengthens and professional life redensifies institutional (organization is power), and the second (support of collectively address), via associations or organizations of people, strengthens the population.
Community Work is a practice that seeks participatory actions and should therefore incorporate populations. Participating organization is inherent to having a certain power: organizational practices that promote community work intended to empower the people through his re-densify institutional reality (cohesion or support) and by generating new cultural-political actors (new organizations), making this true and will. The participation becomes a dual dynamic process:
- Awareness of the existing situation or problem and its causes and conditions and actions that can lead to its positive transcendence.
- Active involvement in the resulting changes, from that awareness.
3. Organizing Process in the Field of Social Intervention
What makes what is considered an organizational process of community work itself is to take place in the area of practice is known as the field of social intervention. Here are some features that could help identify this practice:
- Organizational processes involve both target populations of social intervention and other social actors that make up the social situation or problem that we believe can contribute to changing it. Community Work understood as an organizational process does not prejudge the number of actors or characters, although some portion of the population and professionals should always be present.
- Each is pursuing their own processes of social intervention, i.e., building relationships and social interactions that enable integrative personality development of individuals and colectivos. They pursue social development.
- Community Work organizational processes are applied to the board of situations related to the object that it is for the professions of social intervention: organizational processes that apply to the board of marginalization and social integration. In social spaces, such as politics or trade unionism, corporare professional organizations, organizational practices are not called Community Work.
4) We talked about community work to refer to those organizational practices that are conducted by professional social intervention, whether social workers, educators, community psychologists, or social science professionals who practice the intervention. The organizational processes conocecemos as community work that are, therefore, a very open type of practice, a field of action of various professionals.