From care to social assistance – transformation in a municipality of the province of Lublin. On the thirtieth anniversary of ‘I implore and recommend’ by the Prime Minister Tadeusz Mazowiecki .

Abstract

Aid activities in Poland have a long history. Over the centuries, it took various forms and evolved from mutual assistance, philanthropy, and charity to organized, purposeful activities. Memories of my experience of working in institutional care and then of social welfare concern the period of the turn of the Polish People's Republic and the Third Polish Republic. The systemic changes initiated at that time were of fundamental importance in the development and professionalization of Polish social welfare. I belong to a group of social workers who started work in the 1960s. Therefore, I am an eyewitness and participant in the changes that took place on the "first line" of social welfare in one of the Polish municipalities in which I worked in those years. I tried to explain the reality of social workers in this period. In my memories I recall some events that may seem insignificant in the scale of general changes but reflect the atmosphere of those times. I trust that they will supplement the knowledge about the history of social welfare of this period.