Communities for Social Change: Practicing Equality and Social Justice in Youth and Community Work examines core ideas of social justice and equality that underpin community and youth work. It informs understanding of a range of community concepts and practices that are used to identify practical skills and characteristics that can help to promote equality by challenging injustice. Working with people in different types of community can bring the kind of social change that makes a real and lasting difference. Although justice is a contested notion, Annette Coburn and Sinéad Gormally assert that it is closely interlinked with human rights and equality. A critical examination of contemporary literature draws on educational, sociological, and psychological perspectives, to set community practices within a context for learning that is conversational, critical and informal. Social justice is about identifying and seeking to address structural disadvantage, discrimination, and inequality. The authors assert that by refocusing on process, participation, and collective rights, it is possible to create and sustain social justice. Transformative research paradigms help to produce findings that inspire and underpin political social action, and an analysis of practice-based examples supports the promotion of increased critical consciousness. This makes Communities for Social Change a must-read for anyone studying or teaching community youth work or who is working in communities or with individuals who experience oppression or inequality. If you are committed to teaching and learning about theory and practice that promotes social change for equality and social justice, you will not be disappointed!

Community organizers build solidarity and collective power in fractured communities. They help ordinary people turn their private pain into public action, releasing hidden capacities for leadership and strategy. In Collective Action for Social Change , Aaron Schutz and Marie G. Sandy draw on their extensive experience participating in community organizing activities and teaching courses on the subject to empower novices to think like an organizers.

Community Development for Social Change provides a comprehensive introduction to the theory and practice of community development and associated activities, discusses best practice from global experience and links that to the UK context. The book integrates the realities of practice to key underpinning theories, human rights, values and a commitment to promoting social justice. A range of practice models are described and analysed, including UK models, popular education and community organising, as well as a range of practice issues that need to be understood by community development workers. For example, strategies to promote individual and community empowerment, challenging discrimination, building and sustaining groups, and critical reflection on practice. Finally, a range of case studies from the UK and overseas illustrates good practice in diverse contexts. These case studies are analysed with reference to the values of community development, the promotion of social justice and the underpinning theories. It is an essential text for those on community development courses as well as for a range of workers, including local government, national and local voluntary agencies, and community-based organisations.

Facilitating Community Research for Social Change asks: what does ethical research facilitation look like in projects that seek to move toward social change? How can scholars weave political and social justice through multiple levels of the research process? This edited collection presents chapters that investigate research facilitation in ways that specifically attempt to disrupt and challenge anti-Indigenous and anti-Black racism, ableism, homophobia, transphobia, patriarchy, and sexism to work toward social change. It also explores what it means to develop facilitation practices across multiple contexts and research settings, including specific facilitation methods considered by researchers working with visual and community-based methods with Black, Indigenous, and racialized communities. The complexities of how scholars negotiate decisions within their research with people and communities have an effect not only on how researchers construct their participants and communities, but also on the overall purpose of projects, the ways their projects are shared and disseminated, and what is learned in the doing of facilitation. This book will be of great interest to both emerging and established researchers working within the social sciences. It specifically attends to diverse fields within the social sciences that include health, media studies, environmental studies, social work, sociology, education, participatory visual research methodologies, as well as the evolving field of digital humanities.

The issues of poverty, inequality, racial injustice, and climate change have never been more pressing or paralyzing. Current approaches to social change, which rely on linear thinking and traditional power dynamics to 'solve' social problems, are not helping. In fact, they may only beentrenching the status quo.Systemic social challenges produce bewildering results when we try to solve them due to their complexity, scale, and depth. While strategies to tackle complexity and scale have received significant attention and investment, challenges that arise from deeply-held beliefs, values, and assumptions thatno longer serve us well have been largely overlooked. This book draws on stories of committed social changemakers to uncover a set of principles and practices for social change that dramatically depart from the industrial approach. Rather than delivering solutions or being lured by grander visionsof 'systems change', these principles and practices focus on the process of change itself. Simple yet profound, these stories distil a timely set of lessons for leaders, scholars, and policymakers on how connection, context, and power sit at the heart of the change process, ensuring broader agencyfor people and communities while building social systems that are responsive in a rapidly-changing world.

Help change the world by bringing ideas of social justice into your group work practice! Social workers who use hip-hop music to reach out to troubled adolescents. Practitioners who compare First Nations talking circles with social work practice with groups. A retired professor who transforms the way her fellow senior living center residents participate in their world. Fathers of children with spina bifida who help one another through an online discussion group. These and other examples you’ll discover in Social Work with Groups: Social Justice Through Personal, Community, and Societal Change will help you to assist groups to gain a sense of empowerment and create change in their own lives and communities. In Social Work with Groups: Social Justice Through Personal, Community, and Societal Change you’ll also find: definitions of social justice within the context of social work a proposal to help focus on social justice in teaching guidelines for group facilitators making decisions about self-disclosure studies of innovative group work discussion of the challenges to achieving social justice in group work valuable ways to ground social group work in rich cultural traditions This new book rides the crest of the growing wave of justice in social work with groups. Culled from the proceedings of the 22nd International Symposium of the Association for the Advancement of Social Work with Groups, it gives you the innovations and current thinking of professionals who, while coming from different cultural and professional backgrounds, are focused on helping all people enjoy the same rights and opportunities. If you want to use group work to challenge social inequality, Social Work with Groups will be a welcome addition to your library. Social action that gets results has to start somewhere—let it begin with you!