Direct Community Work

Abstract

The opportunities for the community worker who undertakes direct work to become involved in a community are enormous. Having the time to meet people, for the worker to get to know them and vice versa, gives an undoubted distinctiveness to this strand of the model. On the other hand, direct community work is not a licence for a worker to blend wholly into the lives and culture of rural people. Nor should it be assumed that direct work necessarily requires a worker to be based in a community for an unbounded period of time; quite the contrary, precisely because direct work contains within it the danger of being too open-ended, there is a need for it to be formulated, practised and evaluated with rigour. That may include time-limited commitment by the worker.