The Political Level

Community/Organizational Level

Community

Specific population who share a degree of relationships with each other as well as some experiences and self interest which can be addressed on a Collective basis.

COMMUNITY EMPOWERMENT

Bringing people to a sense of their own power to act to achieve their goals.

Empowerment requires a convergence of capacity, which implies the ability to exercise the power, to access institutions, to nurture, to equity, and , that involve the figure of leadership (individual or group).

Organizing

Group process in which a number o people define a common self interest or unmet need.

Strategize and implement plans of action to meet that self interest or need.

TYPES OF FUNCTIONAL COMMUNITY

RATIONAL (political) Community

Public dimension life.

PRODUCTIVE Community

Economic transactions.

AFFECTIVE Community

Relationships of intimacy.

Subjective fulfillment.

Three experiences of community empowerment around the world

Individual Level

Important considerations

Focuses on people’s potential

Connections between social-political justice and people’s pain and suffering

Developmental process that begins with individual growth and may culminate in social change. (Parsons, 1989- 1991)

Individuals are considered co-builders

Process resides on the person not the helper

The worker

Fellow human being who struggles with issues of daily life in order to develop critical perspective

Challenge his/her own perception of oppression, stigma and power.

Acts as a facilitator.

Assumptions

Individuals are fully capable of solving immediate problems and moving beyond them to analyze institutionalized oppression and the structures that maintain it, as well as its effects upon themselves.

People are able to strengthen internal resources and work collaboratively in their families, groups, and communities to change and empower themselves in order to challenge the very conditions that oppress.

Assumptions

People empower themselves through individual empowerment work, empowerment-oriented group work, community action and political knowledge and skill.

People are capable of praxis: action-reflection and action, action-in-reflection, and dialogue.

The oppressor and the oppressed are damaged by oppression and in need of liberation.

Individuals should

Actively work to change the oppressive environment and mitigate the effects of internalized oppression.

Examine the forces of oppression, name them, face them, and join together to challenge them.

Be the builders

Have the ability to use available resources

Be more in control of interactions and exchanges.

Have the capacity to influence the forces which affect ones life space for one’s own benefit.

Speak openly about power and be engaged in examination of power

Validate peers and a perception of commonality.

See and reach for alternatives

Necessary elements

Critical consciousness and knowledge of oppression

Healthy personality development in the face of oppression

Reducing self-blame

Assuming personal responsibility for change

Enhancing self- efficacy

Personal satisfaction and growth

Heightened self-esteem

Strong support networks and good human relatedness and connections

Motivation

Rewards provided by the environment

Problem-solving skills

Maintenance of psychic comfort (including managing feelings)

Self-direction (think different – act different)

Appreciation of ones culture

Relevant Concepts

Potentialities: the power bases, developed in all of us when there is a goodness of fit between people and environments.

Power of collectivity: People joining together to act, reflect, and act again in the process of praxis. This process is fueled by mutual caring and support.

Critical consciousness raising and dialogue: key methods that help people think, see, talk, and act for themselves

Hopelessness: leads to destruction of self and others, despair, apathy internalized rage, and false beliefs about the worth of the self (Harris, 1993)

Relevant concepts

Empathy: enables bridges to be made and crossed so client and worker can stand together to confront personal blocks to empowerment and injustice.

Ecological perspective: help us to see the interdependence of all living and nonliving systems and the transactional nature of relationships

To envision oppressed people making this effort without changing themselves is to negate the effects of oppression in the lives of the oppressed

Social Workers’ Role, Skills and Interventions

Four Roles

•Resource Consultant Role

•Sensitizer Role

•Teacher Trainer Role

•Cooperator Role

Process

•Promotes reflection thinking, problem solving on person: environment transactions; including client’s role in them and the experience of oppression.

•Assesses ego functioning and provides ego-supportive interventions to bolster client’s strengths

•Collaborating work together to seek change of oppressive conditions.

Coping and Adapting

•Adequate Person: Environment Transactions

–Motivation (incentives and rewards by environment)

–Problem solving skills (strength and efficacy of society’s socializing institutions, i.e., family and schools

–Maintenance of psychic comfort (managing feelings)

–Self-esteem (emotional and other support provided by the environment

–Self-direction (provision of information, choices and adequate time and space.

Empowering Skills to Bolster Motivation

•Basic needs must be met (food, housing, clothing, financial and emotional support) in order for motivation to be sustained.

–SW and client work to gain resources and opportunities and attend to presenting problems

–SW use clients’ own words about his/her problems and accept the client’s definition of their problem

–SW reach for and convey understanding of feelings of difference, isolation, alienation, being misunderstood, as well as discrimination at the hands of systems needed to sustain life and growth.

Continuation of skills to bolster motivation…

•Group together the stressful demands into workable segments

–Explore how they have dealt with these stress/problems before

–Have the client name and own his/her strengths

–Provide a vision and begin to enlist the client’s energy around that vision

–Appropriately self-disclose

–Negotiate with the system that is oppressing

To Maintain Psychic Comfort and Self-esteem

•SW-co-teacher role and critical educator

–SW helps client identify and own his/her group’s achievements

–Heighten awareness and appreciation of the client’s own culture

–Use family and group skills to help members share and validate each other’s experiences with oppression.

•Giving information helps clients gain familiarity with how systems work—diminishes fear and adds to feelings of competence.

•Help to mobilize natural helping networks and structures.

•Focus on changing inequalities that promote the clients discomforts and anxiety.

Enhance problem solving and promote self Direction

•Consciousness raising

•Praxis

•Critical education

Consciousness Raising

•Consciousness raising- is the process of developing heightened awareness and knowledge about situations of oppression which leads to new ways of thinking about the social order.

The skills needed when working with feelings:

•Hearing

•Naming

•Staying with

•Validating

•Helping client’s express the pain, anger and sadness that come with consciously realizing that they have been oppressed and victimized socially and economically.

Skills of Guiding in the process of praxis

•Praxis- action-reflection and returning to action

–Involves a sometimes painful unpeeling of awareness and feeling that takes place overtime

–Good time for worker to share own struggles in challenging such obstacles

–Important to be a problem poser- posing critical questions that help people think about oppressive situations in new ways

– Important to facilitate problem solving

–Critical education are central to the empowerment process

•Skills for Providing Conditions for Empowerment

•Do not be directive

•Do not lecture

•Do not filibuster

•Do not interpret

•Do ask for permission to provide information

•Do encourage information from everyone’s experiences

•Do promote and encourage dialogue

•Do allow clients to come up with their own interpretations

Co-Teaching Role

•SW helps clients to identify thinking patterns

•Revise false beliefs

•Develop more adaptive ways of dealing with internalized and external oppression

•Talk and think healthier about themselves, their group and their situation

•Encourages clients to rename and recreate their own reality, in their own words

Skills to Promote Social Change

•Group and community centered skills are essential

•Build coalitions with other groups and forces in the community to effect social change

•Task-oriented action

•Clear mutual contract that bridges the personal and the political

•Common ground/ common cause among members

•Challenge the obstacles

•Lend a vision

•Reach for each members fullest possible participation in the process

Political Change

•Lobbying

•Testifying at legislative hearings

•Organizing meetings, protests, non-violent-resistance activities

Codes

•Codes are clients own interpretations of their own experiences

•Help them to reach a level of conscious awareness.

•Examples are: Books, Art, Music, Magazines, Poetry and Elders

Develop Codes to focus the Group’s work

•Survey is conducted by the group:

–group listens, and assesses what people are talking about and the emotions linked to it.

•A theme is chosen

–and problems are posed in a question form.

•The problem is analyzed

–from three perspectives: the personal, the institutional and the cultural.

Continuation of Codes…

•A code is developed,

–this code is chose to focus the work when a theme generates all three levels

•Options for actions

–are generated on all three levels

•Action is taken,

–a process of praxis is used to consolidate and deepen the work of developing critical understanding and a vision of social change

Roles and Stance of Social Worker

•Self-awareness-

–worker has to have awareness of his/her own experiences of oppression/ or membership in the oppressor group

•Deal with

–issues of counter-transference

•Have a raised consciousness

–about oppression itself and the ability to share in the helping process through appropriate self-disclosure

Stance

•Worker must

–work side by side with client in the empowerment process

•Worker must

–Conduct an assessment

–Assess client in transaction with oppression

–Assess client in transaction with oppressive environment

Social Worker

•Clinical and political knowledge

•Generalists and specialists

•Consciousness raising

•Praxis

•Dialogue

•Codes

Defining Empowerment theory

Majority of the literature

Empowerment is an intentional ongoing process centered in the local community, involving mutual respect, critical reflection, caring and group participation, through which people lacking an equal share of valued resources gain greater access to and control over those resources.

(Perkins and Zimmerman, 1995, p.570)

It is important…

Not to be fooled by the root word Empower which states that power can be given to another. In social work practice empowerment is seen as the process of gaining power, developing power, talking or seizing power” (Lee, 1996, p. 224)

To understand that “The empowerment process resides in the person not the helper” (Lee, 1996, p. 224)

Barbara Simon

“Empowerment is a process capable of being sustained and initiated only by those who seek power or self determination. Others can only aid or abet in this empowerment process”

(as cited in, Lee, 1996, p224)

Two conditions needed

1.A clinician with a raised consciousness of what is causing their client to be or feel oppressed.

2.A client who seeks to be empowered (Lee, 1996, p.225)

Professionals…

Help “discover and unleash the power that lies within individuals, families, and neighborhoods” (Long & Holle, 2007, p. 195)

“Empathy is an important part of the empowerment process because it enables bridges to be made so that (the) client and worker can stand together to confront personal blocks to empowerment” (Lee, 1996, p. 219)

Historical Precedents

Two major components

1.Social, political and economic movements such as: decolonization, African liberation movement, the women’s movement, gay right movements, civil rights movement, poor people’s power movements.

2.Clinical theories focusing on Human potentialities” (Lee, 1996. P.223)

Jane Addams

The Settlement Movement

Help evolve the empowerment approach by fighting for “social equality, social justice and social reform” (Lee, 1996, p. 221).

Developed the Hull House which made sure that oppressed groups obtained their fare share of resources.

Received a Novel peace Prize in 1938 for her leadership role in domestic reform (Lee, 1996, p221).

African American Women’s Club

Blacks were forced to develop their own helping institutions due to rigid segregation laws (as cited in lee, 1996, p. 221)

Many black women activist such as Ida B. Wells-Barnett and Sara A. Collins-Fernandis were instrumental in promoting social work reform. (Lee, 1996, p.223)

Bertha Capen Reynolds

Pioneer of social work who brought about the importance of empowerment by providing individuals with a sense of social security during a turning point for the American Social Welfare System during the great depression and new deal (1930’s)”

(Lee, 1996, p. 223)

Paulo Freire: Major contributor to empowerment thinking in social work

Greatly believed in the effectiveness of the critical thinking approach in the empowerment theory.

He believed that once one has gained a great level of consciousness they are able to “perceive social, political and economic contradictions and take actions against the oppressive elements of reality” (as cited in Lee, 1996, P.226)

Barbara Bryant Solomon: First to develop the concept of Empowerment for the social work profession

“Powerlessness is based on several factors, such as: economic insecurity, absence of experience in the political arena, absence of access to information, physical and emotional stress, learned helplessness that prevent individuals from actualizing possibilities that do exist” (as cited in lee, 1996, p.224)

A better understanding of Empowerment Theory

The empowerment Theory compels us to think:

In terms of wellness vs. illness, competence vs. deficits and strength vs. weakness.

Interventions that enhance wellness while they also ameliorate problems.

Interventions that provide opportunities for participants to develop the knowledge and skills needed to live a healthy life style

(Perkins & Zimmermen, 1995, p. 570)

For Clients to be truly empowered they must not only “develop critical consciousness but they must reduce self-blame, assume personal responsibility for change and enhance self efficacy” (Lee, 1996, p.226)

Clients themselves need to work on changing their oppressive environment and lessen the effects of internalized oppression (Lee, 1996, p.210)

“Society Blames the victim for power deficits even as power is withheld and abused by dominant groups” (as cited in Lee, 1996, p. 226)

Personal troubles and public issues need to be looked at as a whole in order to understand the role that they each play in causing the client to feel powerless.

People/clients must identify the forces of oppression, must name them, examine them, face them, and join together to challenge them as they have been internalized and encountered in external power structures such as the media, and politics” (Lee, 1996, p.220)

“Theories of empowerment include both processes and outcomes, suggesting that actions, activities, or structures may be empowering and that the outcome of such processes result in a level of being empowered” (as cited in Perkins & Zimmermen, 1995, p.570)

The ultimate goal of empowerment work goes beyond meeting individual needs for growth and power to empowering communities and developing a stronger society (lee, 1996, p.229)