SWK 5953 Integrated

Practice III

Lecture 3:
Values and Principles of
Community Work
Gandhi: Community (Ashram) as love
and harmony
• Inclusiveness, according to Gandhi, was the only
way humanity could be saved from self-
destruction.
• Humanity must breakdown barriers and build
bridges to create peace and harmony in this world.
• A community is only as strong as the family. If
there is love and harmony in a family there will be
love and harmony in a community.
• What happens to one must happen to all –
Equality & Justice
 Respect Æ Understanding Æ
Acceptance Æ Appreciation
• Love and harmony in a family can only be
achieved through strong bonds of
relationship built on respect, understanding,
acceptance and appreciation.
• Respect leads to understanding who we are;
followed by acceptance and appreciation of
our differences.
• Teaching tolerance was anathema to
Gandhi. People, he felt, should not tolerate
each other and their differences, but learn to
respect, understand, accept and appreciate
each other. Only through a strong and
respectful relationship can we have peace
and harmony within ourselves and in our
society.
 Community as an ideal
• Rugged individualism, selfishness, self-
centeredness, greed, anger, materialism etc. that
dominate our lives today do not contribute to
building a community of peace and harmony.
• What we have today is anything but a community
• For other discussion on Ashram and non-
violence (refer to Movie Gandhi handout in
WebCT: Lecture 1)
Lecture Outline

• strength-base (能力為本)
• Empowerment (充權)
• Jutice (公義)
• Participation(參與)
 Assumptions
of Strength Based Perspective
• Respecting client strengths
• Clients have many strengths
• Client motivation is based on fostering
client strengths
• The social worker is a collaborator with
the client
• Avoiding the victim mindset
• Any environment is full of resources
The strengths perspectives-- Saleebey
(1992)
• however downtrodden or sick,
individuals have survived (and in
some cases even thrived). They have
taken steps, summoned up resources,
and coped.
The strengths perspectives-- Saleebey
(1992)
• Workers need to know what they
have done, how they have done it,
what they have learned from doing
it, and what resources (inner and
outer) were available in their
struggle to surmount their troubles
The strengths perspectives-- Saleebey
(1992)
• People are always working on
their situations, even if just
deciding to be resigned to them; as
helpers we must tap into that
work, elucidate it, find and build
on its possibilities.
Knowing the Client’s meaning
• the client's 'meaning' must count
for more in the helping process,
and scientific labels and theories
must count for less"
 Strength of Clients
• Clients own the intimate knowledge
of their situations
• They own the most important
resources.
• Strengths-oriented professionals seek
to pool their own knowledge and
resources with those of the clients
 Asset-based vs. Need-based
• Traditional Need-based: focusing on a
community's needs, deficiencies and problems

– the most traveled, and commands the vast majority

of our financial and human resources.
• Asset-based: beginning with a clear
commitment to discovering a community's
capacities and assets
Need driven Æ Negative Image
• images of crime and violence, of joblessness
and welfare dependency, of gangs and drugs
and homelessness, of vacant and abandoned
land and buildings.
• images of needy and problematic and deficient
neighborhoods populated by needy and
problematic and deficient people.
 Negative Image
Ædisempowerment
• Once accepted as the whole truth about
troubled neighborhoods, this "needs" map
determines how problems are to be addressed,
through deficiency-oriented policies and
programs.
• Public, private and nonprofit human service
systems, often supported by university research
and foundation funding, translate the
programs into local activities that teach people
the nature and extent of their problems, and
the value of services as the answer to their
problems.
 Clients with special need?
• Many lower income urban neighborhoods are
now environments of service where behaviors
are affected because residents come to believe
that their well-being depends upon being a
client.
• They begin to see themselves as people with
special needs that can only be met by outsiders.
Building Communities from the Inside
Out）（Kretzmann and McKnight,
1993
• J. McKnight和 J. Kretzmann of
Northwestern University proposed Asset
Based Community Development (ABCD)
Model
• Stressed building the communities from
the inside out
• The assets within communities are
absolutely necessary but usually not
sufficient to meet the huge development
challenges ahead.
 From recognition to
mobilization of asset
• Not only recognize and map their assets--
the individuals, local associations and
institutions which make up the sinew of
the neighborhood
• but to mobilize them for development
purposes
• Rebuild strength, explore new
opportunity, new production and income
source
 What are the assets inside a
community ?
• Not only the ability and skills of
individual members, but also kinship,
religious, cultural and social activities—
informal network / social capital
• Asset also includes formal institutions e.g.
government departments, private
entreprises, schools, hospitals and
community centres
 ABCD strategy
• Perform ABCD is to recognize, map, link and
moblize all kind of assets in the community
• Appreciative inquiry: find out and evaluate
community’s successful experience and stories
in the past, enhance member self-image and
community identity and active participation
Recognition of social capital
• Social capital is an important asset
of the community
• Rebuild and reinforce social capital
as important strategy of community
development
 Participatory approach

• Focus on ability and resources of

every member, allow equal and full
participation opportunity
• Increase member commitment to the
development of the community
 Community economic
development
• Linking and mobilize different asset
in the community and have collective
cooperation to explore and develop
different/ alternative economic
development models.
 Strengthening the civil society
• Focus on the citizenship and rights of the
community members, which is different
from ‘clients identity’
• Advocate government and private sectors
to have more effective response to
community’s needs.
•
 Empowerment
• Em-power-ment (a process to enhance/
increase power)
• 中文譯名: 充權 增權 賦權 權能激發 居民
授權 促能
• In the functional perspective of local
social work context, empowerment often
means enabling、strengthening, or equal
to personal growth
 Definition of Empowerment
• Solomon (1976) ‘ a process to reduce the
powerlessness’，
• Intervention: explore power blocks of the
powerless people, help them to eliminate
the effect of indirect power block and the
function of direct power block.
 Definition of Empowerment
• Chiu W.S. 趙維生(1997) reframes Solomon’s definition
as:
• The target of empowerment is the vulnerable groups
deprived of power
• Because these groups deprive of power, they are in
discriminated and excluded social positions
• As they lack of power, they also lack resource,
information, as well as ability to change their
vulnerable position
• Empowerment is the activities and process to help
the vunerable groups to have power and change
their own vulnerable position
 Three Dimensions of
Empowerment
(黃洪及李昺偉, 1997)
• 1st Dimension: Vulnerable groups themselves
– Increase ability, confidence, self-image
– Decrease powerlessness, enable client to have
power and strength to control themselves and the
environment
– In most case power = personal adaptability
– Focuse on self-awareness and subjectivity of the
client
– Functionalism: human right, citizen entitlement
movement
– Local example: retraining, YPTP (展翅計劃)
2nd Dimension: power relation
between vulnerable groups and
the mainstream society
• Power is the relationship between
dominator(壓迫者) and dominated (被壓
迫者))
• Class, gender, ethnicity is the most
important element of social
stratification in allocate power to the
different groups
• Empowerment is to change the
oppressive power relations between the
dominator and dominated
2nd Dimension: power relation
• Understand the deprived situation of
the vulnerable groups as being under
the process of ‘disempowerment’ (去權)
(Lui and Wong, 1995)
• Foreign example:black consciousness
movement
• Local example: CSSA recipients 反對削
減綜援
 3rd Dimension: Worldview and
Value of whole society and the
vulnerable groups
• Transform ‘power’ as positive strength
• Stress equality and cooperation
• Use care to substitute oppression and
competition
• Foreign example: Feminist movement
and Green movement
• Local example: Community Economic
Development (COME)
 4 Elements of
Empowerment
• Attitude, value and belief
• Recognition of collective
experience
• Knowledge and skills of
critical thinking
• Action
 Nine ‘empowerment domains in
Community Work (Laverack, 2005)
1. Improves participation;
2. Develops local leadership;
3. Increases problem assessment
capacities;
4. Enhances the ability to ‘ask why’;
5. Builds empowering organizational
structures;
 Nine ‘empowerment domains
6. Improves resource mobilization;
7. Strengthens links to other
organizations and people;
8. Creates an equitable relationship
with outside agents; and
9. Increases control over programme
management.
 Empowerment Summary
• Mullaly (1997): ‘The major assumption of
empowerment is that people are subjects,
human beings with inherent dignity and
worth that should not be conditional on race,
gender, class, or any other inherent
characteristic.
• All people should have reasonable
opportunities and choices over their life
situation and their social environments.
• Empowerment is a goal and a process for
overcoming oppression.’
 Justice(公義/正義)
• John Rawls (1971) Theory of Justice
• Rawls attempts to solve the problem of
distributive justice by utilising a variant
of the familiar device of the social
contract.
• The resultant theory is known as "Justice
as Fairness", from which Rawls derives
his two famous principles of justice: the
liberty principle and the difference
principle.
 Liberty principle
• First Principle: each person is to
have an equal right to the most
extensive scheme of equal basic
liberties compatible with a similar
scheme of liberties for others
 Liberty principle
• basic liberties: political liberty (i.e., to vote
and run for office); freedom of speech and
assembly, liberty of conscience and
freedom of thought, freedom of the person
along with the right to hold property; and
freedom from arbitrary arrest
• more or less absolute, and may not be
violated, even for the sake of the second
principle, above an unspecified but low
level of economic development
 Difference principle
– Social and economic inequalities are to be
arranged so that:
• a) offices and positions must be open to
everyone under conditions of fair equality
of opportunity
• b) they are to be of the greatest benefit to
the least-advantaged members of society
(the difference principle).
 Different views on Justice
(Rita Kwok 郭凱儀, 1995)
• Fair(公平法則)
• Reward should be distributed according
to the contribution of the individuals.
Those with greater contribution should
have bigger reward, this means ‘Fair’
• E.g. Mandatory Provident Fund/
Personal Account retirement benefit
 Equity(均等法則)
• No matter how small or great the
contribution, every one should have the
same share of gain or lost
• E.g. Old Age Pension (老年退休金計劃
(universal pension for all)
• Equal treatment for all people. Every one
should have get the same treatment
irrespective of their sex, religion or status.
 Need (需求法則)
• Allocate resources according to the need
of people. The poor have greater need so
that they should be allocated more
resources, and should not be allocate
according to their contribution.
 Need (需求法則)
• redistribution: resources and wealth，e.g. the
poor need not pay salary tax and the richer
should pay in higher tax rate.
• The roots of social problem is the unequal
distribution of power. Some people have much
more power than others, they exploit other’s
power and made them powerless
• Allocation of resource is in fact the game of
allocation of power, unequal power distribution
induce polarization of the society and widen
gap between the rich and the poor
 Alinsky (1972)
• Two Social Strata: the have & the have
not.
• To solve social problem, people should
adopt confrontational action, use
pressure to made redistribution of
resources. Justice means equal
distribution of social resources.
 Comment
• If we stress on fair, we may overlook whether
everyone have the equal opportunity or ability
to made contribution. We may too calculative
and inhumane, over-stress interest
• Those without ablity will have horrible living
under the ‘Fair’ principle.
• Most target of Community work is vulnerable
group, who have little resources and
contribution, therefore social workers often use
‘Equity’ and ‘Need’ principle to advocate
‘Justice’
 Comment
• Social workers stress groups/government/the
have should have ‘commitment’ to the
vulnerable groups.
• This include moral obligation, forgive and
sympathy. Most social workers use equity and
redistribution principle to understand ‘Justice’,
sometimes separate ‘Fair’ and ‘Justice’
• Reflection: vulnerable groups start from an
unequal starting position in competition, how a
‘fair’ competition can be achieved? If there is
no ‘fair’ competition, how their can be a ‘fair’
justice
 Eight Levels of Participation
(Arnetein, 1969)
• Manipulation (操縱)
• Therapy (治療)
• Informing (通訊)
• Consultation (諮詢)
• Placation (安撫)
• Partnership (伙伴)
• Delegation of Power (賦與權力)
• Citizen Control (市民控制)