Impact of Community Needs on Casework Policy

In this imperfect world of ours, we all too frequently find a parent faced with a difficult reality problem not of his own making. New York schools are overcrowded and teachers often overworked to the point where they cannot give needed individual attention. Many a parent is right when he says that in a better school his children would not be so unruly. Bad housing conditions, periodic unemployment, and subsistence-level public assistance all play their share in contributing to family breakdown. Granting these shortcomings in our society, we know that the individual who wants to lead a full life must learn to make an adjustment to the world as it is. No parent can change the school system, let us say, from one day to the next. As an agency staff we have the responsibility of working toward better community facilities and higher standards, and letting our client group know that we are doing this. We are, for example, attempting an interpretative job with the schools our clients’ children attend and in selected instances we have been successful in helping a family obtain emergency housing. Clients themselves can be encouraged toward positive social action within the range of possibilities open to them. In the short run, however, limitations must be accepted. Here again, whenever we have been unable to reach the client in any other way, we have used the direct approach of telling him that he was expected to do his utmost within the reality situation.

There is another lesson we have learned, or perhaps relearned, since taking on Youth Board contracts. This is the importance of close co-operation among the different agencies interested in the client. Too often, in the more recent past, specialized agencies working in their individual capacities have tended to be oblivious to the client as a total person and of the help one agency can give the other. If the community aim is geared toward prevention, protection, and rehabilitation, agencies must be prepared to be flexible and imaginative not only in the use of their own resources, but also of each other.

Sometimes the sudden impetus of outside stimuli is needed to revitalize capacities within the agency which have become dormant and inactive through disuse. This is what happened when the New York City Board enlisted our co-operation in the fight against juvenile delinquency. The Brooklyn Bureau's ability to rise quickly to this challenge was, as we have seen, due to strong conviction of service to the community in its totality. Such consciousness does not permit of isolationism—neither can it remain confined to a single aspect of our work, such as referrals from one source, nor to service to a distinct group of clients. The staff of the agency, convinced of the validity of this approach and its positive implications as far as protection and prevention are concerned, is now able to broaden the community service given. This means a positive “going out” to clients, whether referred by the Youth Board or other community sources, as well as to the person who comes to our doors with a halting request for assistance but who is too weak and disorganized to pick up immediately on his own. In short, as caseworkers, we have developed a new aliveness to our responsibility to society and a greater awareness of the pulse of the community.

Undoubtedly, we can and shall go further than we have gone to date; change with developing needs is the hallmark of a mature profession. The core of social work is a concern with relationships, with the living together of individuals and the interaction of the individual and society. Perhaps we can think of the voluntary counseling agency as a link between the individual and the community. As has been said, “The profession that does not begin with the individual does not begin and the profession that ends with the individual ends.” Maturity is achieved as we learn to consider ourselves part of a larger whole.