COMMUNITY WORK

Community Work

Community Work

Introduction

Community development is the process of helping a community strengthen itself and develop towards its full potential by working in partnership with local people and organizations to meet identified needs. Involving the community is critical if the partnership is to bring about long-term change in an area. The local community offers a valuable insight into an area and its problems and the partnership can draw support from existing local groups and community networks. The key aim for a community worker is to provide long-term support to communities to develop and manage their own initiatives.

Community work however is an area of practice that is both imprecise and unclear; it can be almost everything to everyone. Yet it is a particular activity with clear boundaries and target groups, informed by a range of disciplines that place the activity in education and welfare fields. Abram (1978,p. 11) states the concept of community is slowly being evicted from British sociology, not because there is agreement on the empirical collapse of community, but rather because the term has come to be used variously and different relationships identified as those of community, have been discovered in so many different contexts that the word itself has become almost devoid of precise meaning.

From this we can see that definitions of community are imprecise and often contradictory which are problematic when trying to identify the main purpose of Community work. According to Popple (1995 p. 6) community has both descriptive and evaluative meaning, and is as much an ideological construct as a description of a locality. The term not only exists in a geographical and material sense but also reflects peoples thinking and feeling as to where they believe a community exists.

Definition

The key purpose of community work is collectively to bring about social change and justice, by working with communities to:

Identify their needs, opportunities, rights and responsibilities

Plan, organise and take action

Evaluate the effectiveness and impact of the action all in ways which challenge oppression and tackle inequalities.

Discussion

In the past community work has therefore been used to refer to post colonial efforts of international aid agencies to promote social and economic progress. More recently it has been used to refer to approaches made by local authorities to make their own services more community orientated to promote social development. Community groups have used community action to describe any kind of activity. Community service according to Glen (1993, p. 23) is often associated with both benevolent and compulsory forms of voluntary assistance to people in need, more generally community services may refer to the multiplicity of locally based statutory and voluntary services. It is suggested that community development and community action both operate at grass roots level, with community development being concerned to promote self-help, and community action actively embracing campaigns.

These kinds of propositions contribute to a theory or models of doing community work. Specht (1975, p. 12) suggests there are two kinds of propositions that make the development of a practice in community ...