Advantages of Community Work: Cultural and Relational

Benefits of Community Work

Organizational experiences are a social space and an instrument for building definitions, interpretations, visions, and common readings of issues, needs, and community action projects. Intervention appears as a cultural meeting place, a place for social interaction with others that becomes a watershed event in the process of changing one’s perspective. It also allows for diversification of intellectual standards, a broadening of perceptions, and analysis.
There is a social space and a means of creating collective identities and group creation. Instrument images and self-images, new identities (personal pride or conscience versus group shameful reputation of the neighborhood or the collective, etc.). A. Twelvetrees sees participation in community action affecting the person. The director of community work, by encouraging people to take positive action and believe they can change things, can help them make better sense of their lives. Of all the learning that those involved in community action experience, it is possible that the most important are the new attitudes, new political perspectives, and a broader understanding of how the world works.
They are social and a tool to connect, very naturally, problems in their social dimension. B. Dumas and M. Séguier say it is from concrete actions, apparently limited in time and space, that people become aware. That grouped consciousness is multidimensional:

a) Awareness of their membership in groups, organizations, and communities that have characteristics and common interests.
b) Awareness of the collective aspects of the problems that other people and groups live and experience in similar situations.
c) Awareness of the political nature of decisions made by governments in relation to public resources, the division of power, etc.
d) Awareness of the link between local situations and problems and the more general (economic, political, and cultural) at different territorial levels: local, provincial, regional, national, and international levels.
e) Awareness of the macro reality.

Organizational experiences are a social space and a tool to break isolation individually and collectively, for the recreation of relations and dialogue, and to increase the social network of individuals and groups. H. Stalwick states as one of the challenges of community development to build what he calls circles of solidarity.
There is a social space and an instrument of individual satisfaction. (People feel great pleasure in friendship, appreciation of others, altruism, respect, etc.).
They are social and an instrument to multiply in everyday life the possibilities of participation. The creation of groups and organizations is a fact that redensifies the social fabric of the territories: the rise of the web of groups and activities that promote reconstruction involves a kind of social fabric.
There is a social space and a tool to increase solidarity. Participation in organizations allows the acquisition of awareness of the possibility of collective action, the power that represents the grouping in relation to isolated individuals, the concerns and interests that bind local groups to each other, etc.
It is a space that makes it possible to receive by giving. Organizing services, activities, demonstrations, or campaigns are addressed to others; organizational experiences allow for desasistencialización.