The application of practice skills to alter the behavior patterns of community groups, organizations, and institutions, or people's relationship and interactions with these entities.
Professionally directed interventions designed to bring about planned change in task groups, organizations, and communities.
Oppressed populations: Groups that experience serious limitations because others in power exploit them.
Populations-at-risk: Groups in society most likely to suffer the consequences of, or be at-risk for, discrimination, economic hardship, and oppression.
Discrimination: Negative treatment of individuals, often based on their membership in some group or upon some characteristic they share with others (i.e., disability, race, sexual preference).
Social and economic justice: When every individual
has equal opportunities, rights, and responsibilities with all other members
of the society. This includes the opportunity to obtain gainful employment,
adequate housing, food, and medical care without experiencing discrimination
or other forms of oppression.
Empowerment: Ensuring that others have the right to power, ability, and authority to achieve self-determination.
Advocacy: Representing, championing, or defending the rights of others. This can be done by working on behalf of individuals and families (case advocacy) or on behalf of entire groups of people (cause advocacy).
Social action: A coordinated effort to achieve
institutional change to meet a need, solve a problem, correct an injustice,
or enhance the quality of human life.
Community forces shape, provide opportunities, and limit clients' behavior.
Clients need the capacity to assess, access and manage, and alter community resources and forces.
Clients need the capacity to contribute to the welfare
of their communities.
Conditions: A phenomenon that is troublesome to a number of people, but that has not been formally identified or publicly labeled as a problem. For example, air pollution, lack of affordable housing, discrimination, inaccessible health care, unemployment and the declining economic base might all be considered conditions.
Problems: A condition that is formally recognized and incorporated into the community's agenda for action. Many conditions exist in a typical community that represent potential problems but are not yet recognized or defined as problems.
Issues: Issues focus on proposed solutions to problems.
They are rooted in controversy and disagreement. People tend to take positions
on issues. They seek to mobilize support for their position and undermine
the support of their opponents.
Strategy: The science and art of orchestrating
resources toward a goal. A process of thinking, an approach to action,
and a method of moving in the desired direction. Requires commitment to
thinking ahead, anticipating alternatives, and achieving results.
Development: Building capacity among people to plan and initiate their own projects and improve social conditions.
Organizing: To identify issues, set goals, determine needed change strategies, and to implement and evaluate those strategies.
Planning: The development, expansion, and coordination of social services and social policies.
Changing: Shifting the balance of power
so that those who have been excluded in the past can be involved in future
decisions.
Locality Development (Bottom-up)
Return to transparencies
Return to syllabus