Community Social Work in Spain

As you already know because of my last entry, the “community work” is a way of working focussed in the environment and the context of the people, because its main idea is that a person have a problem because It is not adapted correctly to the context, and we can’t understand the behaviour of a person without their circumstances.

So, as in other countries, in Spain, community work has the goal to work with the environment of a target group, to screen what is the problem, what things can change and how, and to let the people that live in this environment to act and to take part in this change. People can’t be passive patients; they have to work in their own change, so they have to learn the specific skills and knowledge to participate in their own change. In that way, the environment improves and the people that live in it can improve and grow up too. So, the main idea is to screen the problem in the environment, change it and teach citizens how to participate in this change.

Community work in Spain is carried out by a multidisciplinary team, where social workers, psychologists, volunteers and specialists of the area work together. The key of this multidisciplinary work is that each professional has a point of view that can share with his team, and with all the ideas they can have a global vision of the problem.

To understand how we get the community work situation of nowadays in Spain, we must know a bit the history:

-Until 1965, all the good actions to help people were given by charity, that was leaded by churches and the Spanish State. The attention thar charity offered was individual and focused straight in the person.

-Two changes that were so important to the emergence of the idea of “community work” were: the foundation of United Nations and the appearance of social workers.

-Since 1965 to 1970, the State of Spain did studios to know the reality of the country and they saw that the problem wasn’t in the people; the problem was in the society. So, the State decided to reform all social programs, and they decided that the best idea was to focus the social work in the community: in that way appeared Community Social Work.

So, nowadays the goals of the new vision of social work are:

-See the problem form a global view

-New strategies to solve conflicts

-Change the view: individual problem vs community problem

-Acts to change the reality

Spanish social workers and volunteers, according to Community Work, follow these steps to get Community Social Work objectives:

-Critical awareness

-Best option to solve it

-Acts related with this option

-Review and evaluation