Putting It Together

Abstract

The approach to practice developed in these pages conceives of casework as a stage in a more comprehensive social work intervention. It is a process model of practice in which the practitioner’s casework experience eventually drives the intervention beyond the level of individual ‘cases’ to organised client groups engaged in social action on their own behalf. This movement from casework to community organisation is unlikely to occur in the course of a single case because it relies on an understanding of the immediate socio-political problems uniting a population of clients. Indeed, the community organising activities described in the latter part of the book may take many ‘cases’, spread over months or years, to emerge fully.