Community Social Workers and Place-Based Approach. Impacts, Policy Change and Political Soul of Social Work

Abstract

The contribution analyses the social worker’s policy practice in a program that combines health, social and housing services in the Municipality of Trieste. The Habitat Micro-areas program (HM program) is a relevant example of coordinated actions to improve health and living conditions in vulnerable public housing neighbourhoods. In this contribution social work takes on a broad vision of professional action and looks at the practices and profiles of social, educational and health workers engaged in public services and in the third sector, aware of the necessary theoretical contamination, practice and discipline assumed by the HM program. Focusing on complexity and operational dimension of social innovation in territorial and community social work (how it is done and what is done), emerge some self-evaluative results about: skills and practices of social work that hold together the individual needs for care in a community perspective; the relevance of welfare policy as theoretical, ethical and political dimensions of care activity that includes places and micro-communities; the lack of evidence-based practice and evaluation activity.