LANAO CENTRAL COLLEGE INC.

Awar Street, Marawi City

COURSE: SW 180– SOCIAL WELFARE AGENCY AND MANAGEMENT

INSTRUCTOR: SITTIEWARDA T. MACAPODI, RSW (macapodisittiewarda@gmail.com)
BOOK SOURCE: ADMINISTRATION AND SUPERVISION IN SOCIAL WORK with
special section on beginning Family Therapy and related Supervision, Revised Edition.
3RD WEEK

LESSON:

SOCIAL WELFARE AGENCY

Definition

A social welfare agency is a structured framework within which the administrative tasks
are carried out. It is an instrument of society established through government initiative or through
voluntary efforts to achieve a social goal.
Peter Drucker outlines how a social welfare agency in its simplest form comes into being
when “several people see an unmet need, want to meet that need, get community permission to
meet that need, and accept legal responsibility for seeing that the resources secured, or made
available, are used for specific purpose for which they were given rather than for some other
purpose.”

Types of Social Welfare Agencies

Traditionally, the types of social welfare agencies include:

1. Governmental or public agencies - organizations supported by public funds or taxes.

2. Private or voluntary agencies – organizations supported by private contributions or
donations or income from services. These are popularly referred to as nongovernmental
organizations (NGOs).
3. Semi-government or quasi-governmental organizations – organizations that receive
some form of subsidy, either in cash or kind, from the government.

Characteristics of Public Agencies

The characteristics of public agencies are:

1. They are created through any of these: constitutional mandate, legislative act, executive
order, presidential decree, or letter of instruction.
2. Their existence, functions, and programs are created by law or executive order, hence, may
only be changed or modified by law or executive order.
 3. Their organizational structure is bureaucratic and less flexible than private agencies.
4. They must conform with government procedures, especially the accounting and auditing
of funds, property, and other resources.

Characteristics of Private Agencies

Private agencies are characterized by the following:

1. They are organized as a form of response of private organization to meet people’s needs in
the community.
2. They may be national chapters of international organizations such as the Red Cross, Young
Man Catholic Association (YMCA), World Vision, and others.
3. They may have been established by sectarian or non-sectarian organizations.
4. They are governed by their own charters, constitution and by-laws, and by a governing
board.
5. Their organizational structures do not generally follow a bureaucratic pattern, and
therefore, are more flexible in their policies and programs that enable them to readily
respond to people and community needs.
6. Private agencies can pioneer and initiate demonstration projects which may subsequently
be turned over the government. The latter can adopt the program on a larger scale with
more available resources and organizational capacity.

Size of a Social Welfare Agency

The social welfare agency may be a small organization with a few people involved in the
program or a complex social system involving a great number of people. For a large social welfare
agency, the personnel would include administrators at various levels, professionals, members of
different related professions, clerical, technical, and manual staff, as well as volunteers and
paraprofessionals.

The Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) is a good case illustration
of a large public social welfare agency. In addition to being a national social welfare agency, it has
deployed social work staff in different countries where there are Filipino overseas workers through
the International Social Welfare Services for Filipino Nationals (ISWSFN). In collaboration
with the Department of Foreign Affairs (DFA) and the Department of Labor and
employment (DOLE), the Filipino migrant workers in crisis situation and in need of special
protection are provided proper assistance by virtue of Republic Act (R.A) 8042 of the Migrant
Worker and Overseas Filipino Act of 1995. Smaller in scale and responsibility are the local
government social welfare offices at the provincial and municipality city levels which are
established under the authority of the Local Government Code (LGC). Private agencies exist at
the local level to meet the needs of residents. An example of a small agency is the Philippine
Band of Mercy.
Nature of Social Welfare Agencies

Rosemary C. Sam and Robert D. Vinter suggest that social welfare agencies “must be
viewed both as administrative bureaucracies and as social system.” They are administrative
bureaucracies in that they are established to attain specific goals, and their internal structures,
technologies, and procedures are designed to implement these goals. An example is the Standard
Operating Procedures (SOP) of agencies meant to guide agency workers in the performance of
their tasks to serve particular client groups, in accordance with agency goals. They are social
systems that adaptively respond to external and internal pressures, and they generate informal
patterns that may both facilitate and hamper goal attainment.

Being social systems, social agencies are subject to pressures from outside and within the
organization. For instance, political factors interfere with normal operations of the public agencies
s in the appointment of managers and their staff. Socio-cultural factors such as utang-na-loob,
(debt of gratitude) and pakikisama (getting along with…) oftentimes characterize the informal
relationships that may contravene the formal tenets of the organization. The economic situation
also affects funding and support to social agencies that may cause the cutting down and/or
elimination of existing programs. The professional culture influences social agencies by
establishing standards of practice which are mandated through licensure requirements establishing
standards of practice which are mandated through licensure requirements established by law R.A.
4373 has made a difference in the standards of professional staffing of both public and private
agencies.

Other Types of Social Agencies:

Other types of social agencies may be created by foundation set up by individuals, business
corporations, religious organizations, or even universities. An example is the Philippine Business
for Social Progress(PBSP), a corporate-led non-profit social development foundation in the
Philippines that is committed to poverty alleviation and people development.

ACTIVITY- IV

Instruction : Encoded and will be put on Standard size bond paper with the usual format of the
class. With front page. And format ( Font style : times new roman, Font size : 12 with 1.5 spacing)
Minimum of 2 page aside the given front page.
Discuss each following:

1. For a better understanding of administrations as it applies to special welfare agencies, give

the key features of social welfare agencies and explain each.
2. Describe the types of social welfare agencies and characteristics of each one of them.
3. Illustrate the nature of social agencies.