Community Organising in Transformative Social Work Practice

Abstract

Intervention at the community level is one of the social work interventions in addition to individual and group level interventions. Key to this intervention is community organizing (CO). Genuine CO has a long history of emancipatory practice addressing oppressive structures and exploitative conditions. This emanates from an analytical lens that power relations are embedded in any community. CO has also been a potent process for building the power of the people. When the mainstream “development” work hijacked the concepts and practice of CO and sanitized it to serve its purpose, CO had the difficulty of asserting itself following its original purpose. CO has completely become an instrument and a process of promoting unequal relations and rendering legitimacy to an oppressive and exploitative situation at the community level. Moreover, under neoliberalism, this process has been depoliticized and has been “sharpened” by instituting evidence-based practice (EBP) “as the dominant process for guiding professional community practice.” CO veering away from politics of resistance to politics of cooptation is almost complete. The basic tenets of transformative and structural social work are moorings wherein CO can redeem itself and align its practice in building people’s organizations and the people’s movement against neoliberalism and for emancipation. From these two frameworks, CO can redefine its content, process, parameters for strategic objectives and specific tactical engagements. Retracing its earlier progressive practice, CO can ably chart once again its direction in developing a comprehensive people’s resistance.