COMMUNITY WORK

Henderson and thomas’s (2002) account of community work starts from four contemporary concepts :

1. Social capital, the idea of Puttnam’s developing social and community infrastucture provides  an important resource for contemporary societies
2. Civil society, groupings of ordinary people to from informal organisations to provide   an alternative sector to government and business
3. Capacity-building, theidea that we should seek to build up the human resources of communities
4. Social inclusion, the idea that marginalised group and communities need to be helped to play a stnger role in society

To respond to these ideas, they argue that local communities need to be helped to escape from isolation and marginalisation , becoming connected with resources in wider society. This has direct connections with the ideas of social development discussed above. Their practice approch is summarised in table 10.1 this indication of the practice elements of community work demonstrates that this would also be widely applicable in social development.

Critical practice focus
The havenham community health project
The havenam community health has been set up to improve  healty eating in a deprived area of privately rented accomodation with multi-occupied houses, where migrants to the city have accumulated in overcrowded conditions. However the majority of the population are still ekderly people born in the locality, and now retired.  The local community council has applied for special goverment finance. A requrement of the funding is that 50 per cent of the people involved should be from the local community. Although there is funding for three years, the project will have to be self-financing or be mainstreamed in to officialfunding after that.
At the inagual meeting, groups of local people from vietnam, india, bangladesh and the carribean are present, and some community leaders from these group argue for a project that focuses on support for meals for elderly people in their community. A social work manager from the local adult services team adn an experienced social worker from a local coordinating groud  for voluntaryorganisation for elderly people are invied to join the commitee.
Later local restaurants specialinsing in food from different parts of the world object te the idea because meals reduce their custom and seek to change the food they produce on health grouhds.
Looking at community social development ideas, and possible implementation of social pedadgogy, what alternative ways of developimg a helthy eating projecet might be devised? Looking back at chapter 7, what ideas from system theory might help? Looking at chapters 3 and 5, what criticisms might be made of this aproach to services for elderly people;what might be missing?