Reinventing Human Services: Community and Family-Centered Practice

Is anyone satisfied with today's social services? Citizens complain that ineffectuality and intrusiveness are more common than support, compassion, and protection. Technocrats and politicians criticize the lack of precision and efficiency in social services and try to prescribe ever more specific "outcomes" and "interventions." Communitarians lament the alienation of services from functional, ethical community life. Professionals fret that their status, well-being, and ability to foster individualized improvements are imperiled by managed care and other intrusions into professional relationships. Given these complaints, is it time to "reinvent" social services in the same way as government and other social institutions supposedly are being reinvented? In this splendid book, Paul Adams, Kristine Nelson, and their colleagues take us into the realm of practical imagination and innovation.

In 1993 the editors and chapter authors retreated to the University of Iowa Center for Advanced Studies to contemplate, discuss, and debate family- and community-based approaches to social work. All but two of the book's 14 chapters are products of this seminar. The basic premise of all the chapters is the pressing need to bring the community into the thinking and practice of all social services, including areas that traditionally have been considered micro practice. The authors focus on the need to rethink the entire enterprise of human services. However, because new inventions are made from existing resources, the goal is to challenge practitioners to draw on the long tradition of empowerment-oriented practice in social work to adapt key principles to their own situations and to reinvent good social work practice.

The book is divided into three parts. Part one, Context of Community- and Family-Centered Practice, begins with Robert Halpern's brief history of neighborhood-based services in low-income neighborhoods. This chapter provides an overview of the history of neighborhood-based services, citing connections between many of today's problems and the alienation between communities and professionals that occurred in the 1960s. In chapter two, Peter S. Fisher discusses the economic context of community-centered practice and the market-based economy's contributions to inequality and poverty among families. His premise is that in reinventing services we should examine the ideological basis of public policy and expose the market's role in legitimizing the current unequal distribution of wealth and power. In addition to these conventional liberal analyses, this chapter presents important ideas about the effects of the distribution of wealth on the isolation of communities and on how we think about them.

Part one concludes with Gerald G. Smale's stimulating ideas that urge us to think of community practice and individual practice as inseparable and of our ability to affect the quality of the symbiosis. Smale states that partnerships "are not in front of us, they are all around, and include us." Smale emphasizes the need to create and operationalize a practice theory that addresses the issues and problems inherent with community-practice partnerships. He cites examples from Great Britain, including the "patch" approach sometimes used in British social services. This chapter is the most challenging in the book. Smale conceptualizes excellent existing community practice and thereby inductively formulates a new family of practice theories. The result provides the basis of innovation in, or reinvention of, social work. This task is crucial to making services innovative and responsive while maintaining professional expertise. Anyone dealing with the "person in the environment" will find this chapter stimulating.

Part two, Creating Community- and Family-Centered Practice, includes seven chapters that present examples of family-centered and community-centered practice from social services, education, and policing. Adams and Karin Krauth expand on Smale's chapter with examples of successful American applications of patch-based community social work. In this context, patch means a geographical area and implies comprehensive, team-oriented, highly integrated services for the area. Other examples of practice models include Mary R. Lewis's results from a study conducted in 12 highly industrialized countries identifying risk factors that contribute to the educational disadvantage of children. Part two also includes chapters on policing and recognizing young people as community resources. Each chapter offers useful variations on the theme of putting community into practice formulations.

Part three presents four chapters that focus on changes that are necessary in order to integrate families and communities into social work practice. Most of these changes are obvious to readers who have comprehended the points made in earlier chapters. Change needs to occur in the areas of communication, our professional understanding of community versus individualism, expanding the focus of intervention from the individual to include support networks of friends and family, and finally strengthening the relationship between families and service providers.

Rothenbuler explores the question "What is community?" He attempts to reconceptualize community as a legitimate venue for social work practice while acknowledging the barriers that are created by the lack of consensus about what we mean by community. A communications professor, Rothenbuler proposes that "successful community-centered practice will be based on social circumstances in which communication forms routinely wed actors' destinies together, mutually obligating them, and providing a variety of symbolic means for routinely transcending social differences."

One might assume that clinicians are more likely to be individually oriented than community oriented in their work and outlook. Swenson's chapter presents results from an inductive study of clinicians' perceptions of community in their personal and professional lives. The findings show that clinicians indeed adopted an individualistic perspective. Swenson's most powerful findings focus on clinicians' timidity in bringing community concepts into their work, especially their lack of conceptual models and language for alternatives to individualistic practice. It is as if clinicians' lack of a conceptual model prevents them from being aware of the fact that any kind of practice always conveys implicit values about community and individualism. This chapter is an excellent companion to Smale's. In chapter 13, William Quinn provides examples of how practitioners might overcome such an individualistic focus. The book concludes with a chapter co-authored by Robert Cohen and Christopher Lavach that returns to the notion of partnership as critical to new conceptualizations. This volume is an excellent resource. Although it's hard to know what reinvented social services would look like in reality, the reader is offered ideas about the quality of experience participants would share and about characteristics of the social relations and social institutions that would result from the new services. The book does not deal in depth with the complex issues that arise in community models of practice, including the nature of confidentiality, the role of individual responsibility for change, the role of social control in social services, and the nature and means of evaluation and accountability. The roots of humanistic and utopian thinking in social work and related professions are likewise important matters to understand in depth when engaging in the reinvention process. Nevertheless, this important book provides a full share of challenges and suggestions with which we may begin the practical work of reinvention. It is impossible for us to be fully satisfied with social services. However, if the services are part of the fabric of new forms of community life, perhaps we will not even refer to them as social services any more. This book challenges us to be open to new possibilities, to be clear about our values, and not to be wedded to our conventions about the correct ways to provide care and prevention.

W David Harrison Sally Herring School of Social Work University of Alabama Tuscaloosa, Alabama

Copyright Family Service America Sep/Oct 1997
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