Community Intervention: Understanding Social Spaces

Facing the Interpretation of Action (Business Diagnosis)

In this process of immersion, the community worker should become a benchmark in terms of knowing the neighborhood. A walking encyclopedia full of accurate and relevant information on individuals, organizations, and neighborhood characteristics.

The professionalism that is expected of him makes building a good knowledge necessary to advance their cause in the face of resource allocation, budgeting, or future grants, to justify certain aspects of the intervention, to disseminate information among neighbors and extend awareness of issues, to argue better, etc. For this reason, the approach to the neighborhood can be translated into different product types or reports with wide utility.

The last two products are what best identifies the objectives that the community worker pursues in the study of the neighborhood: it comes to understanding a social situation, either generic (the overall situation in the neighborhood), or more specific (a situation or problem in a specific sector).

In social intervention, skills are linked (or integrated, has its roots) in a form of specific performance in view of the action we call diagnosis. The diagnosis is the culmination of knowledge that is useful for intervention and the starting point of our action projects.

Understanding Social Spaces

When speaking about the analysis of reality or knowledge construction in community work, often thought of almost exclusively on the analysis of a neighborhood or locality. However, the analysis of reality that can make a community worker beyond the geographical boundaries, and may want to consider knowledge of a specific group and situation that affects them (poor families, migrants from an area, etc.), an institution (a civic or cultural center, a hospital), etc.

Sometimes what we should do is to combine these various studies.

Once a diagnosis of general type, you may need to look deeper into the study of any of the specific problems that have been recognized. That deepening knowledge around specific issues may come in the form of participatory research carried out by organizations or groups at the moment of entry of the community worker, it may not yet exist.