Community Social Work: Principles and Best Practices

Areas of Community Social Work

Implementation and Development of Community Activity

In the field of implementation and development of community activity:

• Link to organizations and formal or informal leadership that exist within the community with the process of change.
• Train those involved, increasing their ability to act collectively and face challenges that are structural in nature and require community action to solve them.
• Establish a communication protocol that supports transparency of information, and disseminate the achievements and developments of the problems being addressed.
• Establish a gradual devolution of power in the community by promoting their self-organization and leadership development that allows for an increased role of the population.
• New creativity: The community social worker should be open to possible changes resulting from the implementation of a process of revitalization of a community.

Assessment in Community Social Work

In the area of assessment:

• Continuous assessment is open to the reformulation of the problems, both in its development and the perception of these have the people with whom you work.
• Review open to the future: it has to allow editing of the goals defined in the initial diagnosis, establishing guidelines for building on the momentum of change.
• Consolidate the improvements over time: higher levels of relational density, improved ability to diagnose all the challenges and opportunities, more and better links between people who form the community (facilitating appropriate communication patterns that facilitate the dissemination of information, the capacity for dialogue, and a model of democratic and participatory decision).

Principles of Social Work

The professional activity of social workers is based on three principles:

1. Ethical Principle: The ontological equality of all people, whatever their ethnicity, religion, culture, or gender.
2. Political Principle: Democratic citizenship. We are all citizens and have inalienable rights. To exercise them, we need a structured society that makes them visible. Hence, citizens themselves are involved in directing the course of events through various forms of participation, including local, regional, national, and supranational European Parliament elections, for example.
3. Economic Principle: In two directions: as a space, the market, which makes goods and services, and as a mechanism of social integration. Through paid work, we integrate into our society since getting the Social Security card for future contributions to a pension or paying medical insurance premiums.

The Goal of Community Social Work

The ultimate goal of social work is to increase social cohesion. From the specific perspective of community social work, the object of intervention is the society that we disaggregate into specific areas such as education or health. These areas are always closely related, and only for issues to more effectively focus our intervention in one area or another. In this sense, the improvements obtained in one dimension, for example in education, immediately affect the other dimensions and elevate the community's capacity to organize themselves and confront the opportunities and challenges it faces.

Community Dynamics and Communication

Community dynamics is characterized by transversality. It affects different spheres of social life, and it articulates a collective plural form of different ages and goals that do not always coincide. Therefore, it is important to establish effective communication protocols that allow shared development of diagnostics and the establishment of agreed community action strategies.

The Medium of Social Interactions

One important question is the medium in which social interactions unfold in the community. It can be in everyday physical space and time or over the Internet. The network reproduces the inequalities of our advanced societies, in a complex social structure that, once established, tends to remain inertially in time. Therefore, it is important not to leave the development of citizenship only in virtual space in the hands of the forces of recolonization of the market. It is a democratic process from the perspective of social work.