Community Worker Roles, Skills, and Impact
Understanding Community Work
Community work involves professionals who are instrumental in fostering community action and development. The authors have identified a variety of functions that manifest the richness of situations where professionals can be helpful.
A comprehensive professional technical training is essential for community workers, encompassing skills such as technical research, analysis, planning, organization, interaction, and communication. However, other relational and communicative skills are equally crucial, often stemming more from personal qualities or experiences than from strict scientific training.
Key Roles and Functions of a Community Worker
Being a community worker means promoting the establishment of a driving force or an organization. It involves being a dynamic animator of the group and its meetings, assisting in building a community diagnosis, and developing collective projects with the community in action, among many other tasks.
The community worker must possess great versatility, serving as a resource person who deploys varied skills throughout the process. These roles can include:
- Assistant: Facilitating activities.
- Communicator: Ensuring clear information exchange.
- Organizer: Structuring efforts and resources.
- Observer: Understanding group dynamics and needs.
- Inciter: Encouraging participation and action.
- Mediator: Resolving conflicts and fostering consensus.
- Advisor: Providing guidance and information.
- Ombudsman: Advocating for community interests.
- Militant: Actively supporting community causes.
- Trainer: Building skills within the community.
- Catalyst: Initiating change and progress.
- Animator: Energizing and motivating groups.
- Expert: Offering specialized knowledge.
- Strategist: Planning and executing long-term goals.
Intensity of Intervention in Community Work
A social worker acts as a strategist in utilizing their potential, which also implies adaptability. The roles and intensity of their involvement will vary depending on the group, the work phase, the goals, the scenario, existing constraints, and even personal preferences.
A. Brown noted that typically, in the initial stages of a group, the social worker is highly active and directive, serving as a central figure in establishing the group’s structure. Subsequently, group members assume increasing responsibilities, leading to a decisive shift where members gradually take ownership, moving towards an autonomous position.
P. Henderson and D.N. Thomas argue that there are good reasons to favor non-directivity – an attitude that empowers the group by entrusting responsibility and decision-making to its members. However, this does not mean that practitioners should reject directive approaches if they prove more efficient. For instance, the initial moments of a group’s life may call for a significant dose of directivity.
Influence and Essential Qualities of a Community Worker
Community work fundamentally relies on people’s involvement. An organizer seeks to involve others because they are themselves involved; they look for people to have their own projects because they also have one. Beyond ideas on how to change a situation, a community worker possesses an influence project, rooted in their vision of a desirable society. Without these qualities, a community worker cannot convince others and lacks persuasiveness.
In this sense, the concept of “non-directivity” does not seem to be the most appropriate style to describe the democratic, participatory, dialogic, and non-prescriptive relationships that community workers must foster with group members.
The qualities described by Saul Alinsky for an organizer confirm this view:
- To believe in people, an organizer must believe in themselves.
- They should possess a contagious ego and a contagious confidence in their creative capabilities.
- Furthermore, they must be curious, irreverent, imaginative, and humorous.
- They should have a presentiment of a better world.
- An organized personality, pride, and a will to win are essential.
- Finally, an open mind is crucial.
All these qualities serve to create conditions for collective action to launch and succeed without undermining the autonomy of the people being organized. This means without making decisions for them and without doing what the members themselves can do.