Reinventing Human Services: Community- and Family-Centered Practice / Edition 1

by Benjamin Higgins, Paul Adams

Overview

Dissatisfaction with a human services system that is unresponsive, stigmatizing, and ineffective has led to a ferment of experimentation in recent years. Reinventing Human Services examines the historical and economic context of current efforts to reinvent human services, showing the urgency and the difficulty of the task. It draws on successful examples in Britain, Canada, and the United States to develop a new paradigm for social work practice, one that integrates individual, family, and community levels of practice and reconceptualizes professional-community relations. The interdisciplinary team of authors includes scholars, researchers, and practitioners from the disciplines of economics, urban planning, communications, criminal justice, psychology, marriage and family therapy, education, and social work.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780202360980
Publisher:	Transaction Publishers
Publication date:	12/31/1995
Series:	Modern Applications of Social Work Series
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	296
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.67(d)

Table of Contents

Introduction; I: The Context of Community- and Family-Centered Practice; 1: Neighborhood-Based Services in Low-Income Neighborhoods: A Brief History; 2: The Economic Context of Community-Centered Practice: Markets, Communities, and Social Policy; 3: Integrating Community and Individual Practice: A New Paradigm for Practice; II: Creating Community- and Family-Centered Practice: Examples from the Social Services, Education, and Policing; 4: Working with Families and Communities: The Patch Approach; 5: Family-Centered Social Services: Moving Toward System Change; 6: Self-Employment Training and Family Development: An Integrated Strategy for Family Empowerment; 7: School-Based Comprehensive Services: An Example of Interagency Collaboration; 8: Linking Schools with Family- and Community-Centered Services; 9: Community Policing: The Police as a Community Resource; 10: Young People as Community Resources: New Forms of Participation; III: Changing Practice to Include Families and Communities; 11: Understanding and Constructing Community: A Communication Approach; 12: Professional Understandings of Community: At a Loss for Words?; 13: Expanding the Focus of Intervention: The Importance of Family/Community Relations; 14: Strengthening Partnerships between Families and Service Providers

Editorial Reviews

Originating in a faculty research seminar, essays in this collection focus on the need to reconceptualize human services as family and community centered. Rather than treating individual pathology, this orientation emphasizes empowerment and client strengths using family and community interactions. Despite differences in the level of abstraction and writing style, all contributors share a community- and family-centered conceptualization of human services… Their prescription is based on sound theory and many successful demonstration projects. For all social work or human service collections.” —M. E. Elwell, Choice

From the Publisher