Contemporary Community Practice Top of Form Bottom of Form Overview This Topic -

Contemporary Community Practice

Top of Form

Bottom of Form

Overview

This Topic provides you with an introduction to community practice.

It includes discussion of:

What is meant by ‘community’ and ‘community work’

The attributes of a ‘community worker’

The Developmental Process of community work

Learning Objectives

At the completion of this Topic, you should be able to:

Explain what is meant by ‘community’ and ‘community work’

Identify the attributes of a ‘community worker’

Outline key aspects of the developmental process used in community work

What is Community Practice?

Community practice is about the ongoing, developmental work, of building a strong citizen base, in which people really have a voice and are prepared to speak and act for the broader good.

Professional work with communities has an important place in contemporary human service and social work practice. Indeed community practice involves a set of knowledge and skills that are valuable to all professionals who work with people. They can be used by teachers, town planners, health professionals, environmentalists, creative artists, and, indeed, anyone who endeavors to enhance the lives and relationships of individuals, their families and their communities across any dimension of human life – practical, social, cultural, personal, spiritual, environmental, political and economic.

This course is designed to provide knowledge and practical skills for connecting with people in local communities or communities of interest around opportunities, aspirations, and difficulties which the people themselves experience and want to address. This can include:

developing local social and economic opportunities,

addressing injustices,

establishing dialogue between groups and

building local capacity.

Community practice is best learned through doing it. We encourage you to try out the skills and draw on theory to reflect. We ask you not to approach assessment by showing you can repeat what the literature says, but by showing you can play with, practice, explore, unpack and come to your own understanding of, what the literature says. There is a way of thinking, a way of building relationships and a set of skills, strategies and techniques that may at times resemble things you have learned before (in interpersonal skills or group facilitation, for example) but they are put together in a very different framework within community practice. These practice components only become really effective, when a worker integrates them into a style of work and practice framework that is personally meaningful, that is developed in an ongoing way through reflection, and that is tested for effectiveness in real life situations.

Let’s begin by exploring what we mean when we say the word ‘community’. Community is often defined as people who identify themselves and are linked by:

A shared circumstance

A shared history and politics

A common interest

A shared geographical space

Community is about connection and building bridges from one group to another, from difference to solidarity. Community is an ongoing process of linking with others, building relationships, standing together, making connections, creating change.

It can also be said that community is ‘Public Work’. This is because community work draws strong connections between people’s private lives the Private World and the world we share in common – the Public World.

Community work is different from casework, group work and counseling in that there is no procedure or ‘pro forma’ to follow. Instead, community work is about going wherever the people you are working with take you. The diagram below lists some more key points about community work:

Community work begins with the poorest, most marginalised, disadvantaged or those most affected by adverse policies

Community work assists in the movement of a private concern to a public action

Community work works with individuals, groups and structures

Community work, works from a participation paradigm

Community work is relational work. It is about relationships

Community work is people centered

Community work is social justice work

Community work draws on dialogue as a powerful tool for change

Overall, Community work sees there is a public dimension to private issues, pains, concerns, frustrations, and problems. It is about taking action to address the public dimension of issues and concerns.

As you learn throughout the course, the above points will become clearer to you as you learn what community work is and what it isn’t.

Community work has drawn on a range of historical ‘citizen’ movements, including the Civil Rights movement in America and other activist and non-violent movements. It has been influenced by the concept of participation. There are multiple and contested meanings of participation, which are best understood through studying the struggles of others before us. Democracy also informs community work, as does a critical understanding of poverty. Several social theorists have influenced community work practice, including Jurgen Habermas, Pierre Bourdieu, Michele Foucault, and Anthony Giddens.

The principles that underpin community work include:

Equality and anti-discrimination

Social justice

Collective action

Community empowerment

Working and learning together

Collaboration

Participation

Democracy

There are many ways of thinking about what community practice is – but these different approaches all come under the community umbrella because people from the community are involved in some way.

In summary, community work is depicted by the following diagram:

Community work practice is about building the rich fabric of community and all that it can offer to people (this can be called community building).

It is also a method by which people in the community work together to address issues they think are important and to achieve goals which they themselves have set (this can be called community development).

It is about people in the community providing help and support to others (this can be called community service).

Finally, it is about people collectively acting against a new development, an injustice or an exploitation (this can be called community action)

Watch the videos below. Each Video explores community development from an understanding of the practice. It is in the doing that we understand the work.

Additional Task

Watch this video that explores what Community Development is:

https://youtu.be/_Cq1l81NT70

Mini Lecture: Practice Overview

Listen to this mini lecture in which 3 practitioners talk about their roles and their approach to community development.

https://youtu.be/c2CXwq7DlqEActivity

ACTIVITY

We have just introduced some important points about community practice. See if you can summarise what it is. What does this mean to you?

Record your thinking and share your thoughts with your student colleagues.

What is a community practitioner?

A Community worker or practitioner works alongside people as a resource for their activities. The people you work with are the initiators and the actors on their own agendas. The Community worker resources this process and tries to keep the decision making with the people. In this way, Community workers work in relationship with others. The worker must ‘see through the eyes of the other’.

There are a range of attributes that a Community Practitioner needs.

The first is the ability to work with people of all backgrounds. This might include people of different socio-economic, religious, ethnic and professional backgrounds. As a worker, you will need to find ways to connect across divisions and differences so that you can effectively build relationships.

A Community practitioner also needs the ability to empathise and communicate with people in different situations and roles and with people from different cultures, backgrounds and beliefs. This can be challenging if you as the worker have no personal experience of the struggles faced by your clients.

You will need to understand the support needs of people lacking confidence or the conditions to participate in community activity as well as the ability to work with people who are under stress from a harsh local situation.

Community practitioners usually do their work within a particular community or locality. You will need to understand the tensions and stresses that sometimes arise between different groups of people in a locality. This will require that you find ways to build relationships with different community members and seek to understand the differing views that people may hold.

The ability to see the commonality of issues and problems across individuals’ situations and concerns is another key attribute of a Community worker. To do this, you will need to be able to draw back and take a wide view of what is happening in a given community.

You will need the ability to work with a broad spectrum of people, services and organisations. This could include the manager of a local service, politicians or a concerned citizen.

These key attributes can be developed and enhanced as you grow your skills in community work. The first step is to listen. It is through listening that you can begin to understand the lives of those that you work with.

The Developmental Process

Throughout this course and in your reading you will observe that various terms are used, such as community practice, community work, community building, community development, community action, community service, community engagement, community capacity building, community renewal and sometimes some of these are used almost interchangeably with terms like social action and social development, and even, more recently, social enterprise. This can be frustrating, and we ask you not to get too sidetracked by trying to pin precise meanings to the terms. The important thing is to identify that all the terms refer to the involvement of people with each other to work together for some kind of change.

Sometimes that change is initiated by an organisation or government agency, but if the term community is present, then it should flag that the people who are affected in their everyday lives, have opportunity to be involved in the action for change. If the change is conceived and led and enacted by service providers, it is better understood as service development or similar, NOT community development or community practice.

Service providers can play an important role in working across a locality to develop up service responses to the specifics of the locality and its people. We can call this community based service development to distinguish it from activities driven by the community members. Such professional activity can still be embraced within a repertoire of community practices, Of course, a powerful combination is when community driven and service provider driven and policy driven initiatives intersect.

To quickly read the direction of action in community development, people have coined the terms Top Down and Bottom Up.

Remember that there are many ways that aspects of community practice can be included in almost any job. You don’t have to be in a community development role to include the knowledge and skills of community practice in your day to day work.

In a school context, for example, a professional can support a group of students to take action for change. A nurse can support families to act for change, a teacher can support a group of parents to achieve a goal that they set, a chaplain can support a youth group to act on an agenda that is important to them, a town planner can support residents to develop and express their position on a development, a doctor can support remote residents to run their own rehabilitation group.

Connie Benn from the Brotherhood of Saint Laurence, was the first in Australia to write about the developmental process in community work. In order to move forward with their issues, people must have four things:

Power in relationships

Power over resources

Power over information

Power over decisions

Often, at the start, people do not have much or any of this. The developmental process is about working in ways that increase these within a group.

Watch this video in which Desmond Tutu discusses the importance of community, read the quote by Lila Watson.

Additional Task

Watch the following video of Archbishop Desmond Tutu speaking about Ubuntu:

How do the values exemplified in the concept named Ubuntu relate to Community Work Practice?

Activity

The quote below, by Lila Watson, captures the spirit of community development work and we will feature it in every topic as a reminder of the importance of working alongside others. Think about the quote and the challenges that Desmond Tutu outlines.

Required Readings

To complete this Topic, you will need to read the following readings: Please access the reading from the Readings tab in the Course menu or from the textbook as required reading.

* Essential Reading:

Kelly, A. & Westoby, P. Participatory Development Practice. Using traditional and contemporary frameworks. Pp. 9-12. Practical Action Publishing. ATTACHED