Community-centered Redesign of Service Delivery Programs
Published in The Roundtable, vol. 3, no. 4 (May 2000), p. 8 ff.

The vast majority of nonprofit human-service providers have evolved into service-delivery systems, rather than organizations focused on renewing distressed, disinvested communities. Managers and program operators who desire to invest in the goals of neighborhood self-sufficiency and tightly woven social organization that are the hallmarks of community-centered practice will recognize the role of the environment in the lives of the families they are trying to serve. Traditional services have limited power to act on contextual issues such as poverty of resources, crime and delinquency, neighborhood order, and public health. Community-centered practice requires a deliberate strategy that looks for potential overlap between service delivery and these larger issues. This area of overlap is a fertile ground for rethinking and redirecting interactions with residents and community members that occur in the context of conventional services.

In a recent "group think" with fellow social workers in the Alliance for Children and Families’ network, I was challenged to conceptually redesign foster care so as to make it more constructive of community. Together we laid down a set of ideas that demonstrate this approach, setting aside, for the moment, the realities of implementation. Some ideas were new, others familiar. They included:

• Use foster homes from the child’s own neighborhood. This tactic supports frequent contact between the birth parents and child, between birth parents and foster parents, and the maintenance of the child’s neighborhood peer relationships.

• Recruit foster homes in the catchment area of the child’s own school. This adds the element of maintaining relationships with school peers and teachers, as well as the continuity of the child’s educational experience generally.

• Recruit foster parents from the same church as the birth parents. The church itself is engaged both as a common context of interaction between the sets of parents and as a source of common values.

• Place the child in the home of relatives. This builds on existing family ties, promoting frequent contact and mutual support.

• Recruit block clubs as resources/sponsors to foster parents. Block clubs are critical elements of social capital that anchor parents and children in a local social network. The link of club to foster parents provides a ready avenue for foster children to construct new peer and mentor relationships. Moreover, research has shown that involvement of parents with other coresident parents enhances informal social control.

• Involve neighborhood groups in recruitment or licensing of foster homes. The existing structure of relationships and knowledge that weave residents together is itself a resource in any type of recruitment effort. Building new capabilities, even those customarily considered the province of professionals, forever enhances the neighborhood’s ability to collectively address its own needs and goals.

Re-engineering service delivery to render it more constructive of social organization need not require wholesale substitution of goals. It does, however, call us to conceptualize individuals and families as embedded in and dependent on social context, thus reclaiming the historic community orientation of social work. The key to community-centered redesign of service delivery is to recognize the community’s capacity to care for itself, by making our interventions align with existing relationships, articulate with existing community structure, or create enduring new capability within the neighborhood.