Community Social Work: Strategies for Immigrant Integration

Strategies for Community Social Work

Projects between groups of immigrants often face challenges due to inadequate management of the host country's official language.

Promoting Social Inclusion Through Multidisciplinary Teams

Work in multidisciplinary teams to promote social inclusion. Setting concrete and achievable goals in key areas for greater social cohesion (education, work, health, leisure, sport, culture) requires collaboration from professionals in fields like social work, labor market training, and socio-cultural development.

Establishing Meeting Spaces for Debate and Discussion

Establish spaces for meetings, both virtual and physical, that allow for debate and discussion among participants. Schedule review meetings, monitoring, and evaluation sessions by area and collectively. These sectoral meetings should be supplemented by assemblies where all participants can intervene and discuss the results achieved.

Encouraging Community Self-Organization

Encourage community self-organization by establishing a protocol for communication and decision-making that allows for democratic participation and a more intense integration of community members over time.

Training Participants in Conflict Management

Train participants to assume the management of conflicts over power and knowledge that inevitably occur in all human groups. Establish protocols to solve conflicts democratically and accept the normal loss of prominence, not only of the social worker but also of emerging leaders within the community, once they have completed their cycle in the management of the organization.

Experiences in Community Social Work: The Masai Housing Program

1. EXPERIENCES OF COMMUNITY SOCIAL WORK - Masai Housing Program based on the methodology of community social work in Kajiadi (Kenya).
Start date: 1990. Sponsor: (ITDG).

Diagnosis of the Situation

a) Diagnosis of the situation:
This housing project is for the Masai people.
The Maasai have a semi-nomadic lifestyle, and the women are in charge of building the houses wherever they go. Before the intervention, homes were characterized by leaky roofs, damp and dark rooms with limited heights that forced the occupants to walk crouched.

Objectives of the Program

b) Objectives:
Strengthening the capacity of women to get the type of housing they need through training in advanced construction techniques and the institutional development of women's groups.