British Journal of Social Work (2000) 30, 287–303

Applying a Community Needs Profiling Approach to Tackling Service User Poverty Roger Green Roger Green is Head of the Centre for Social Work and Community Research at the University of Hertfordshire. He has spent the past four years researching poverty and exclusion on the Kingsmead Estate in Hackney, East London where he also works as a volunteer community advice worker with the Kabin Project based on the estate. Correspondence to Roger Green, Centre for Social Work and Community Research, University of Hertfordshire, College Lane, Hatfield, Hertfordshire AL10 9AB, UK. Email: [email protected]

Summary Poverty across the United Kingdom is a growing phenomenon. Its impact on the users of social work services is well documented. This paper puts forward the argument that poverty is a legitimate part of the social work agenda rather than being seen as a complex problem which is somehow outside the scope of social work agencies and best left to politicians and policy makers. Social work practitioners and managers must not only begin to accept and acknowledge that poverty is a social work issue but also to begin confronting this challenge in a changing society where exclusion, social inequality, racism and oppression deny people their citizenship. The community needs profiling approach is proposed as a useful tool in addressing service user poverty whereby practitioners and their agencies can become more aware of the needs of users and the communities in which they live. It is argued that, armed with this knowledge, social workers have the potential to become part of the solution rather than remaining on the margins of the lives of poor people. Using evidence and ideas drawn from a range of community needs profiling research studies and texts, the author offers working suggestions for applying the approach.

Poverty is a Social Work Issue Poverty is on the increase, with over 55 million, or one in seven households of the population of the European Union (EU), now living in poverty (Brand, 1996). In Germany, for example, over two million children now live in families with an

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income below half the average earnings, the EU definition of poverty (Otto, 1998). In the United Kingdom (UK) whether poverty is measured by household income or welfare benefit levels (Oppenheim and Harker, 1996) or in terms of the social exclusion and marginalization which prevents the participation of people in mainstream communal life (Room, 1995; Jordan, 1996) or by listening to the voices of the poor themselves (Oxfam, 1996; Green, 1997a), poverty is a fact of daily life for increasing numbers of people. There is growing evidence of the ever-widening gulf between the richest and poorest households. Nearly three in ten children in England and Wales are living in the poorest families and almost 25 per cent of children are living with a parent who is unemployed (Department of Social Security, 1998). Similarly, household expenditure varies from £96 a week for the poorest tenth of households to £720 a week for the richest tenth (Office for National Statistics, 1998), and food poverty is a reality for people on low incomes (Lobstein, 1997). With some four million children, (one child in three), and 14 million (one in four) people living in poverty in the UK (Child Poverty Action Group, 1998) such evidence confirms what many front line social workers have long suspected: that the majority of people making contact with social work agencies both in the statutory sector and through voluntary and community organizations have often had a long experience of being at the receiving end of poverty (Cosis-Brown, 1998; Inman, 1998). Many have a history of being in and out of low paid temporary or part-time employment; others have become dependent on social security benefits which often fail to cover individuals’ and families’ daily living expenses. A number of studies (Hannam, 1987; Ferns and Geller, 1988; Gregory, 1988; Broadbent, 1989; Schorr, 1992; and Green, 1997a) have demonstrated that the majority of users of social work services experience poverty. Nor is this situation new. In the pre-Seebohm era before the creation of social services departments, Jeffrys (1965), amongst others, highlighted how poverty and its consequences were important factors in why people become the clients of social workers. Indeed, the reality has been that since the pioneering days of the Charity Organisation Society (COS) which witnessed the origins of modern social work in the UK at the latter end of the nineteenth century, one of the commonest characteristics of the social work user population has been poverty and deprivation (Jones, 1997). Social workers are aware, as Becker (1997) has noted, that users’ problems— such as inadequate housing, relationship difficulties, criminality, family problems, child abuse, discrimination and social exclusion in all their many insidious forms— are very often complicated and exacerbated by the experience of poverty. Whilst the extent of that awareness is perhaps variable, the link between poverty and service users has been well documented by a number of studies. Examples include, Broad’s (1994) work, on the problems of entitlement to benefits for young people leaving care, and the NCH Action for Children (1994) report showing how debt has a major impact on the daily lives of the families its staff work with in family centres and other projects. Similarly Rogers et al.’s (1993) work shows the link between unemployment and mental health problems, in particular the pressure on many mental health service users who are forced to live on inadequate state benefits, and Green

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and Farrington’s (1996) case studies illustrate the experiences of refugees and disabled service users benefiting from social work intervention in maximizing their incomes. Two of the UK Government’s own Department of Health child-care reports (1991, 1995) have highlighted the disparity between those children coming into care whose families are dependent on benefits compared to others and the poverty dynamic apparent when children from poor working class families come to the attention of child protection agencies. In addition, public inquiries, such as that in Cleveland (Cleveland Report, 1988) have referred to the economic and social deprivation found in communities where such deaths have occurred. More recent research has shown that the majority of children coming into care at the local level are from the poorest section of the community: families on benefit (Freeman and Lockhart, 1994). However to what degree these studies have informed social work practice or the planning, organization and delivery of social work services based on peoples’ needs is a debatable point. As Dhooge and Becker (1989) have noted, whilst social workers are concerned about client poverty and its impact on their practice they are unclear to what extent they should respond. More recent views (Becker, 1997; Jones, 1997) stress that an anti-poverty perspective is largely absent from the social work agenda, with poor families citing the retreat to family casework and the managing of ‘dysfunctional families’ as one factor amongst a number which have effectively excluded the poverty dynamic. If we accept that poverty is the manifestation of the structural inequalities that exist in the UK in the late 1990s, the role of social work and the personal social services should be to reclaim this ground; to challenge these inequalities on behalf of, and with, the people and communities we serve. Community needs profiling, as the next section will argue, is an approach that offers the potential of being a useful tool in addressing poverty. It offers social workers the opportunity to recontextualize their work in providing information on poverty at the micro and macro levels, challenges attitudes and possibly stereotypical views of poor families, and fosters the development of anti-oppressive practice initiatives that respond to need.

What is community needs profiling? There are a number of competing definitions and distinguishing features as to what community needs profiling is. Dominelli (1990), for example, sees it as being a ‘detailed picture of a community’ (Dominelli, 1990, p. 59). Twelvetrees (1991) pushes this definition further by viewing it as a method of gathering information about the needs of a community that provides opportunities for community action. Other writers (e.g. Smith, 1993) argue that it achieves three objectives; first, informing the practice of the worker, secondly, supporting an application for funding for a specific project and lastly, providing information to support a campaign or community change. The term ‘community needs profile’ is similarly not one term which has universal

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acceptance (Burton, 1993). Different terminology may be used to describe a process or approach that is essentially concerned with the same aim: that of identifying local needs. Hawtin et al. (1994) take the position that it is possible to construct a typology based on what they call ’distinguishing features’ (1994, p. 2) which highlight the differences between various approaches. These are: I What is the purpose of the exercise? I Who is initiating the project? I To what extent is the community involved? I What is the scope of the exercise? On this basis, they differentiate between need assessments, community consultation, social audits and the community needs profile. Whatever the differences, I would argue that community needs profiling should be seen as an umbrella term for an approach which attempts to gain information about a community, particularly its needs, and to use this as the basis for change and community development. In seeking to achieve this, the profiling will use a range of methods to gather information, for example: interviews with clients and/or professionals working in the community being surveyed or profiled; postal surveys to agencies in the area; focus group discussions with community representatives. Also possible are: participant observation, for example, by walking or driving around an area; and the use of secondary data such as official statistics, for example, in census data, and agency records (Gilchrist and Green, 1994). Community needs profiling is not new, nor is its applications to social work a recent innovation. Its origins can be traced to American writers on community such as Warren (1955) who produced a comprehensive working manual for professionals, residents and community organizations interested in undertaking research into an aspect of the community in which they worked or lived. This work followed on from the pioneering work of Bynington (1911) and Colcord (1939), who both produced community study guides for practising social workers with the aim of increasing their knowledge of the communities they worked in and to inform their practice. In the UK community work has similarly had a long tradition of community workers and neighbourhood workers ‘getting to know’ the needs of the community in which they are working (Baldock, 1974; Milson 1974; Henderson et al., 1980; Henderson and Thomas, 1987). In fact, the gathering of information in the form of a community analysis is seen by some authors as the ‘critical first step’ (Hagland et al., 1990, p. 91) before any community intervention can begin. Within social work, that by Glampson et al. (1975) could be seen as one of the earliest attempts in the UK to provide a guide for social workers wishing to become more involved in the assessment of needs and resources in the areas where they worked. Similarly the work of Leissner and Joslin (1974) prefaced all social work intervention with service users by reference to their community and a working knowledge of that community. The community social work movement from the 1980s onwards also had a clear commitment to locating social

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work intervention within a community setting, using as its baseline a knowledge of the community and its needs and strengths (see for example, Hearn and Thomson, 1987; Smale et al., 1988; Hearn, 1991; Watts, 1991). Later work by Barber (1991) and Durrant (1993) built on this by arguing that gathering evidence and information about the community in which the social worker is employed can both support the need for changes to social work agencies’ policies and put the ‘community’ back into casework with service users. Bob Holman’s on-going work in Easterhouse, Glasgow (1990, 1992, 1993a, 1995, 1997) demonstrates that, at the level of practice with poor families, this community-based model of social work is very much alive. In the 1990s interest in community needs profiling has been stimulated by a number of factors, such as the need for health authorities to undertake health needs assessments of local communities as a statutory requirement of the National Health Service and Community Act 1990. Similarly local authority social services departments are expected continually to update the information they hold on the needs of populations within their locality as an essential feature of their community care plans and children’s care plans. They may also participate in community safety planning. Partnership and consultation with local communities and community organizations representing local residents is implicit, too, in central government Single Regeneration Budget initiatives and European-funded projects. These have spawned a number of publications for professionals, community organizations and residents wishing to undertake their own community surveys (Policy Research Unit, 1994), gain a working knowledge of a community (Gilchrist and Green, 1994) or identify its needs (Burton, 1993). Other relevant sources outline the use of community needs profiling in: informing the planning and delivery of services (Hawtin et al., 1994); needs assessment in relation to public services (Percy-Smith, 1996); identifying local health needs (Burton and Harrison, 1996); and needs assessment in community care (Baldwin, 1998). These have been supplemented by an increasing number of small, localized community needs profile studies undertaken by a range of organizations such as health authorities and community health councils, community groups, local authorities, church groups and academics. Examples demonstrate the diversity of community needs profiling in researching, for example, the needs of asylum seekers and refugees (Awiah, 1992; Barnet Borough Voluntary Service Council, 1995; Green, 1996b), the problems which affect rural communities (Pauncefort, 1993), and the mental health needs of users and the wider community (Green, 1996a). Other examples include a needs assessment of a social sector housing estate (Green, 1995), and social audits of communities (see, for example, London Borough of Newham, 1985, and the Cross-Gates Council of Churches, 1989, prompted by the Archbishop of Canterbury’s Commission’s report (1985) Faith in the City). In addition to this the National Association of Citizen Advice Bureaux (1992) requires local community-based bureaux to undertake community needs profiles alongside a client profile on a regular basis. This is to enable bureaux to update their information about the community they serve and to assess whether the service

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they offer meets its requirements. In addition, the process is seen as supporting grant applications to local authorities and other funding bodies (Rainbow, 1995). This has led to the publication of a number of citizen advice bureaux profiles (Rickmansworth Citizens Advice Bureau, 1989; Kensington and Chelsea Citizens Advice Bureau, 1992; Green, 1994). In parallel to these developments, there has been, since 1984, an increasing number of profiles focusing on poverty undertaken by local authorities following an initiative from the Association of Metropolitan Authorities (Balloch and Jones, 1990). The impetus behind such profiles has been the need for information as to the extent of poverty in local areas, its distribution, and in some instances the experience of poverty. These have provided substantial statistical information, based on geographical areas such as local authority areas, sub-localities and electoral wards. The Breadline Greenwich Report (BMRB International Limited, 1994), and Griffiths’ profiles of poverty in the London Boroughs of Hackney (1996) and Waltham Forest (1997) are recent examples. These profiles have resulted in many local authorities developing anti-poverty strategies ranging from income maximization through benefit take-up campaigns, the development of credit unions, and discount card schemes for accessing council services (e.g. Rotherham Borough Council, 1993). However, despite this diverse spread of community needs profiling studies which have produced invaluable data on communities, particularly when focusing on the specific needs of certain groups, their community development potential has tended to be underplayed or ignored. This has been noticeable in the case of the service users of social work agencies and, in particular, in relation to their experience and needs arising from the daily affects of poverty. With the exception of Blackburn’s (1992) excellent handbook on working with families in poverty, which highlights the importance of undertaking a poverty needs profile, service users have not generally been the subject of community needs poverty profiles. The result has been a lack of reference to poor people or to any analysis of poverty in communities based on questioning, for example, whether existing social work services meet their needs, what gaps in services might exist, or to what extent users in poverty access social work services. This, then, begs the question as to the reasons why undertaking a community needs profile might be beneficial in informing both social work policy and practice. The following section offers a number of working suggestions for applying the approach to practice initiatives.

Applying Community Needs Profiling to Social Work Practice Blackburn (1992) views poverty profiles as being useful for a number of reasons including: identifying needs and gaps in services; providing data on local poverty, and providing data for agencies to plan, deliver and evaluate services more effectively. Similarly, Dhooge and Becker (1989) provide us with a useful model for developing a strategy for social services to respond to the needs of people

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experiencing poverty. Using this as a baseline, the benefits of applying a community needs profiling approach can be twofold: first, at the level of the individual social worker in relation to their intervention with service users, and, secondly, at the agency level in the form of policies, the development of services, and their evaluation.

Informing Social Work Practice The potential outcomes for social workers undertaking their own community needs profiles within the area or communities in which they work fall into four categories: information, processes, contextualization and practice.

Information Here is offered what Hawtin et al. (1994) call ‘baseline information’ (p. 12) about a locality. This could provide information about: I the extent of poverty within the area or community, for example, indicators such as the numbers and groups of people dependent on welfare benefits, amongst families, disabled and older people I types of housing tenure in the area, for example are poor families mostly located in public sector housing, housing association, or privately rented accommodation? I unemployment levels: the numbers of families without a wage earner. What evidence is there of low pay in the area and of income inequality generally? What is the family composition distribution in the area, for example, the percentage of lone parents and older people living alone? I the distribution of poverty in any given locality is equally important to understand; for example, does poverty cluster in a certain area, such as a few streets, a specific ward or a public sector housing estate? In collecting this information it is important to recognize the number of competing definitions and explanations of poverty (for example, see Blackburn, 1992; MacDermott, 1998). However one of the most commonly used definitions is Townsend’s (1979): Individuals . . . can be said to be in poverty when they lack the resources to obtain the types of diet, participate in the activities and have the living conditions and amenities which are customary, or at least widely encouraged or approved, in the societies to which they belong (Townsend, 1979, p. 1).

Townsend’s wider definition, which recognizes the importance of the lack of opportunity to participate in communal life, goes beyond material need as the sole defining factor which produces and maintains poverty and allows us, as Blackburn writes, ‘to raise awareness of the multidimensional experience of poverty’ (1992, p. 29). The relevant layers of poverty revealed by the needs profile are the personal dimension;

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what individuals and families experience; data from the geographical area in which the profile was undertaken; comparative data from the borough, district or county council area in which it is located; and research data available at the national level.

Processes Blackburn has argued that, to become more effective in working with families in poverty, ’agencies will have to become better informed about the processes that create and maintain family poverty locally and nationally’ (1991, p. 165). Awareness of some of these processes and how they might precipitate people’s contact with social work agencies as revealed by a community needs profile, allows practitioners to analyse and be better informed of the costs of poverty for service users. Relevant processes include the link between reliance on welfare benefits and children’s experience of being inadequately fed and clothed and not experiencing holidays (Green, 1997a); The connection between high levels of unemployment, poor health, depression and mental illness (Dhooge and Dooris, 1988); the way in which the lack of affordable child-care facilities coupled with low paid local employment maintains people in the poverty trap (Griffiths, 1997); and the experience amongst communities with low incomes of a range of problems such as family break-up, and risk of child abuse (Waterhouse and McGhee, 1998). Recognizing such processes and their associated problems enables individual social workers and teams to reflect on their methods, strategies and styles of working with service users in situations of poverty. A related point is that it might also be possible to identify from agency workloads whether there is a particular neighbourhood that is receiving a disproportionate level of social work intervention, whether this be with families, older people or mental health service users. Locating the extent of poverty in a given area through workload or caseload analysis might further highlight possible links between individual, family and community poverty, and referral and contact with social work agencies.

Contextualization A more critical awareness of the social, economic and material context to working with poor individuals and families is also necessary. Davis’s (1991) model, which draws heavily on the work of Hardiker and Barker (1988), is particularly useful in achieving this, with what she has termed a ‘structural approach to social work’ (Davis, 1991, p. 64). This model operates at three distinct levels: first, at the structural level, it gives an understanding of inequalities such as poverty and how they are reinforced; secondly, at the organizational level, the role of social work agencies and social workers in providing resources and services to tackle user need can be explored, and lastly, at the interactional or psycho-social level, it aims to locate individual users’ problems and concerns within their structural context. As a result it may well begin to challenge some

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of the assumptions, attitudes and stereotypical beliefs about poor families often held by individual social workers and social work agencies (Green, 1997b). A working example could be the promotion of a contextual and individualistic understanding of how families in poverty are assessed and reviewed by those who participate in child protection case conferences (see Littlechild, 1992).

Practice Contextualization does not simply refer to casework in terms, for example, of a greater understanding of the benefits system when working with families receiving income support. Rather, a conceptual leap may be required for the social worker to use a more community-oriented approach to their practice based on the knowledge of individual, family and community poverty gained from the profile. This would include locating family work within both the local micro socio-economic milieu and the broader forces that shape poor communities and their residents. As Holman (1993b) has argued, the community social work approach based in neighbourhood family centres is a model that can provide locally responsive services that begin to meet the widespread needs of the community. Such services can start to offer both material and emotional support within an innovatory and action based agenda. At the same time social workers also need to recognize the patterns of inequality in many families and the primary role of women in managing the finances of low-income families even where there is a male partner (Goode et al., 1998). Information resulting from a community needs profile may include an understanding of how the local informal social economy operates, for example, the social network of family and friends who occasionally lend money, offer free childminding, or lifts to the local shops, or carry out minor household repairs. Where such networks exist, the social worker’s role could be to strengthen them, or, where they are weak or non-existent, then a community development approach could be used to facilitate them, for example, using a model expounded by Henderson (1997) which builds on the skills and capacities of marginalized people themselves. Similarly, professional networking by ‘plugging’ into existing local anti-poverty networks and, for example, setting-up local branches of Child Poverty Action Group with service users and other residents could form part of this process. Indeed supporting and encouraging people to speak out about their poverty is a key way in which social workers can begin to help people to reclaim and re-empower themselves and their communities, challenging what Rees (1991) has viewed as being the acceptance of one’s position with its notions of passivity and learned helplessness. It may well be that the most significant outcome of the profile is social workers’ adoption of intervention strategies, which go beyond the contemporary form of surveillance and supervision. Developing instead a practice model, which takes cognizance of where people live, and the ebb and flow of their daily lives within their community, as Lister argues, helps ‘to promote the citizenship of those in poverty and other marginalized groups’ (1998, p. 160).

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Agency Level Writing in the late 1980s, Dhooge and Becker (1989) noted that social services departments were coming under increasing pressure to cope with a growing demand for social work support alongside new legislation and cuts in local authority finances. In the current context little appears to have changed. Indeed, demand has further increased in a social work world now shaped by a culture of market-led terminology, performance measurements and the doctrine of managerialism. If community needs profiling is to be accepted into this new agenda, then its outcomes for social work agencies purposes must be its contribution to policies, service provision, the evaluation of services and practitioners’ interventions. Organizational benefits include policies grounded in service user and community needs, services based on research findings, and social work intervention models and strategies that are compatible with people’s needs and are more evidence-based.

Policies Local authority social services departments have traditionally developed policies using a ‘top-down’ model which, often as not, has been shaped by the political demands of councillors or managers and other officers with their own personal and professional agendas (Dominelli, 1997). Researching the local area could begin to challenge the widely held notion that research has only a marginal role to play in developing policies. The ‘ambivalent relationship’ (Everitt, 1998, p. 104) that social work has generally had with research could begin to be effectively confronted. The valuable information gathered by a profile of poverty, particularly if undertaken by social work professionals, could be disseminated (Dhooge and Becker, 1989) to influence policy formulation within their own local authority social services departments. Furthermore as a professional and occupational group employed by a major policy and resource provider yet located in local communities, social work could begin to have a key advocacy role on behalf of the poor. Examples could include the development of policy initiatives aimed at increasing preventative work with poor families, or at moving closer to the ‘felt’ needs of mental health users who, for example, may be reluctant to access ‘traditional’ services such as day centres. Equally, social work agencies might begin to re-examine their current policies, considering, for example, whether new policies and accompanying services should be introduced which were more responsive to the changing needs of, say, older people experiencing poverty and isolation in their locality. Similarly, if a profile established that a significant number of children in a locality had unmet needs as a result of growing up in poverty, a policy change might see additional or existing resources being targeted to ‘children in need’ as defined, in, Section 17 of the Children Act 1989. A further result of a profile might be to produce evidence that groups of users were underclaiming their benefit entitlements. By creating income maximization policy initiatives, such as benefit take-up campaigns and benefit

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checks by social workers aimed at, for example, older people and disabled people, agency policies could be targeted more effectively.

Service Provision Blackburn (1992), writing about what families in poverty find most helpful from service providers, highlights such issues as services that are accessible and relevant; partnership with professionals and their agencies; and the permanency of services. Such views can no doubt be applied to all client and service user groups. Indeed, an important element of the findings of a needs profile would have to be the extent to which existing services meet their needs. Services to a range of service user groups might need to be reassessed to make them more responsive. The identification of gaps in service provision—for example, services to asylum-seeking families or young people leaving care—would allow an opportunity for agencies to consider reconfiguring services. Detailed questions might include whether services should be centralized or decentralized to the local level to match service user needs, or alternatively, whether they might be made more accessible by utilizing existing community-based provision. Information gathered might also indicate service user and other community representation interest in the planning of services for their local areas. Whilst locality planning forums and groups already exist, for example in Hertfordshire Social Services Department (1997), consultation and participation in the planning of services might further enhance such existing models. The information arising from a community needs profile, such as evidence of low take-up of services amongst certain ethnic minority groups new to an area, could enable social work agencies to seek additional funding for specific projects. Overall the promotion of preventative anti-poverty strategies, not only at individual and family level but also at the more general community level, would be firmly based on the evidence of ‘felt’ need and not, as is often the case, on need as perceived by professionals, local government officers and politicians.

Evaluation of Services As I have argued, existing agency policies and services should be subject to evaluation following a community needs profiling exercise not only to measure their effectiveness but also to highlight any gaps in provision. Titterton (1988) provides a useful model in achieving this, first, by evaluating the distribution of poverty amongst clients subject to social work intervention, for example, the numbers in receipt of Income Support and other related benefits. This would also enable agencies to assess the level of demand from individuals and families experiencing poverty on existing services, and it might highlight the mismatch between service provision and user need, for example, a lack of family support strategies. Secondly, the outcomes of specific types of intervention can be evaluated, for example, whether casework, group work or community development

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work—or a combination of all three—is the most effective method of working with poor families. As Holman (1993a) has argued with the community social work model and Barr (1991) indicates in his review and analysis of Strathclyde Council’s programme of community development, there are a number of possible options. This is an important question. To what extent does social work practice ‘help’ service users, particularly those in poverty? Using the baseline information provided by the profile it would be possible to look for evidence of the links between types or models of social work intervention and successful outcomes by asking service users directly for their views, getting feedback about progress being made, and gauging their level of satisfaction about the service provided.

Rediscovering our History? Younghusband (1981) in her overview of the history of the social work profession in the UK, was quite clear about poverty being a social work concern: ‘From the beginning social work was interwoven with poverty and deprivation’ (Younghusband, 1981, p. 9). This trend continued through the Seebohm Report (1968), which recommended that the new social services departments in the UK should concern themselves with preventing hardship, to the Barclay Report (National Institute for Social Work, 1982), which acknowledged the poverty-related problems which clients brought to social workers. Revisions in the education and training of social workers, through the Diploma in Social Work, also require students to have both knowledge and understanding of poverty and how it might affect users’ daily lives when working with them (CCETSW, 1995). Likewise, the recognized professional association for social workers in the UK, the British Association of Social Workers (BASW), has in its Code of Ethics clear reference to the structural position of social workers in working with the poor: ‘Social workers are often at the interface between powerful organizations and relatively powerless applicants for service’ (BASW, 1996, p. 2). The Code also promotes the potential advocacy role of social workers on behalf of the poor: ‘the worker has the right and duty to bring to the attention of those in power, and of the general public, ways in which the activities of government, society or agencies, create or contribute to hardship and suffering or militate against their relief’ (BASW, 1996, p. 1). Despite these official and professional exhortations, poverty still has an ambiguous role in both policy and practice. It is often not named in agencies’ working remit with users and there is an absence of an ‘anti-poverty perspective’ too in social workers’ practice methods (Becker, 1997, p. 109). At the organizational level this is due in part to statutory agencies’ mission to manage and treat families who come to their attention without reference to the wider social and political landscape or the communities in which poor families live. At the individual level, social workers appear to be suffering from collective amnesia as to why most of us came into the social work profession in the first place. Was it to help people, to create a better society, to fight injustice? Perhaps we would do well to revisit our past and, at the

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same time, to listen to why applicants for social work training courses wish to enter the social work profession. Many years ago now Howard Becker (1971) the American sociologist posed the question in relation to the role of sociological research in the USA as to whose side are we on? Later Filkin and Naish (1982) highlighted the inherent dangers of community workers adopting a neutral perspective or ‘fence sitting’ in their work. Within social work, the radical tradition clearly argued in favour of supporting the powerless, the users, against the welfare bureaucracies, the social services departments they themselves were employed by (Langan and Lee, 1989). In more recent years, the writings of Beresford and Croft (1993) and Dominelli (1997) have outlined a role for social workers in supporting the development of user-led services and a redefining of professionalism towards a model which is anti-oppressive and far more user-centred. This ‘taking sides’ argument supports the re-empowerment of poor people who are in contact with social workers and actively encourages a partnership with them which goes beyond the rhetoric of traditional top-down social work professionalism by engaging in their lives at both the micro- and macro-levels of their daily existence.

Conclusion Community needs profiling undertaken by social workers could begin to help shift this balance. Working alongside poor families in gaining in-depth information and knowledge about their communities, identifying their needs as ‘felt’ by them, and developing policies, social work practice and services to help tackle their poverty is a way forward. Accepted: May 1999

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Applying a Community Needs Profiling Approach to ... - Oxford Journals

Applying a Community Needs Profiling. Approach to Tackling Service User. Poverty. Roger Green. Roger Green is Head of the Centre for Social Work and Community Research at the University of. Hertfordshire. He has spent the past four years researching poverty and exclusion on the Kingsmead. Estate in Hackney, East ...

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