Social Educator in Practice. The Participatory Dimension of Working with People Experiencing Homelessness

Abstract

Bearing in mind the image of the homeless functioning in our society, a thesis can be presented that it is not the fact of being homeless that causes social exclusion of people experiencing homelessness, but the perception of the homeless by others and the resulting social reactions towards them. Beresford proposes among others: focusing activity on the disabling society; overcoming division into service users and service providers, and; encouraging participation of service users in social work, education, practice, and research (Beresford, 2014). Participative practices co-created with people experiencing homelessness through the implemented research and projects reflect the above postulates. Thanks to the involvement of various social entities, they break the stereotypes about homeless people; they overcome divisions between service users and providers, blurring the borders between them due to the implemented activities; finally, they involve service users in different aspects of lives, including the practice, as they become experts in their needs and undertaken activities, they join to help others or initiate such help, thus sometimes it is hard to tell a volunteer from a project participant. The objective of this text is to reconstruct the activities increasing the participative potential of the implemented research and projects. In the text I present the nature of socially involved research conducted by me. Then I discuss the efforts undertaken in order to boost the participative potential of the implemented research and projects, on the basis of specific actions promoting voluntary and subjective decisions about getting involved, a diagnosis of participative needs, the inclusion of wider society groups to participative practices, or the participative impact on a structurally conditioned situation of people experiencing homelessness.