Is It Possible to Build Communities "One Family at a Time?" A Critique
Published in The Roundtable, vol. 3, no. 7 (September 2000), p. 5

A major barrier to the development of community-building strategies among social workers and agencies that pursue the tradition of social casework is our unwillingness to appreciate communities as social systems that are distinct from families. Mainstream social work over the past 30 years has retreated from efforts to change the structural and environmental conditions under which people live, concentrating instead on the "person" term in the person-in-environment paradigm.

This ideology is succinctly captured in annual reports of family-service agencies wishing to express their allegiance to community building: We build strong communities one family at a time. The roots of this mission statement tap into the original definition of casework, formulated by the Charity Organization Societies in the early 20^th century: Those processes which develop personality through adjustments consciously affected, individual by individual, between men and their social environment.

It is wise to consider what concept is embodied here. The contemporary mission statement quoted above presumes the relationship of units (individuals, families) and the systems in which they partake (families and communities, respectively). It asserts that we can address system-level issues by changing the units.

• At the first level — individuals in the context of their families — one might ask: Can you improve family functioning by improving the individual-level functioning of each family member? For example, if you improve the individual functioning of adults in a nuclear family, will the family necessarily do a better job at raising its children?

• At the second level — families in the context of their neighborhood — I would ask: Can you improve neighborhood functioning by improving the functioning of individual families that live in the neighborhood? For example, by improving family functioning, will you necessarily improve neighborhood security, paucity of resources, or social capital?

Dodd and Gutierrez, in their 1990 paper on the absence of a community perspective in social work education, summarized the dilemma. Social work’s preoccupation with casework and the intrapsychic has prevented the majority of social workers from understanding the structural barriers to individual and group adjustment.

A fundamental conceptual problem lies hidden in the one-family-at-a-time formulation. The frame asserts that systems are the aggregate of the units that partake in the system. This represents a reduction — in fact, an annihilation — of the idea of a system. A social system such as a community is always more than the sum of its units, and the implications of overlooking the social system are direct and serious. In the case of community, the web of relationships by which community members, families, and institutions are reciprocally bound is ground zero for community-building efforts. This ground disappears from view in the one-family-at-a-time model.

Furthermore, the functioning of individuals and families is distinct from the functioning of communities or neighborhoods. Families function in ways not essentially characteristic of individuals, such as raising and nurturing children. Neighborhoods or communities function in ways not essentially characteristic of families, such as providing for public safety and security, means for earning a living (e.g., jobs), ways of obtaining the necessities of life (e.g., markets), cultural identity, and many others. Neighborhoods and the functions they serve are simply not reducible to the families that reside there.

The fundamental point is that community building is directed at reforming the structural and environmental conditions under which people live, one of social work’s original goals. Strategies for improvement of individuals and families, though worthy, have not and will not change these conditions. If the profession of social work is going to contribute significantly to a community’s capacity to provide for its members, we must give social systems theoretical status in our models and in our practice. This means expanding our repertoire beyond individual and family support by designing and implementing actions to help communities become more organized.