Diversity Perspectives

Diversity Perspectives
• Strengths Perspective
• Empowerment Perspectives
• Spirituality and Faith Sensitive Perspectives
• Ethno- cultural Perspectives
Diversity
• Social workers understand that diversity characterizes and shapes
human experience and is critical to the formation of identity. Diversity
is multi-dimensional and includes race, disability, class, economic
status, age, sexuality, gender (including transgender), faith and belief,
and the intersection of these and other characteristics.
• We understand that because of difference, and perception of
difference, a person's life experience may include oppression,
marginalization and alienation as well as privilege, power and acclaim.
We identify this and promote equality.
Strengths Perspective
Strengths Perspective
• The Strengths Perspective is an approach to social work that puts
the strengths and resources of people, communities, and their
environments, rather than their problems and pathologies, at the
center of the helping process.
• It was created as a corrective and transformative challenge to
predominant practices and policies that reduce people and their
potential to deficits, pathologies, problems, and dysfunctions.
The Strengths Perspective emphasizes the human capacity for
resilience, resistance, courage, thriving, and ingenuity, and it
champions the rights of individuals and communities to form and
achieve their own goals and aspirations.
Strengths Perspective
• While acknowledging the difficulties that clients experience, the
Strengths Perspective never limits people to their traumas,
problems, obstacles, illness, or adversity; rather, it addresses
them as challenges, opportunities, and motivators for change.
• Social workers are enjoined to collaborate with clients, their
families, and communities to discover and generate hopes and
opportunities, to mobilize inner and environmental strengths and
resources, and to act for individual and collective empowerment
and social justice. Thus, the helping relationship is characterized
by alliance, empathy, collaboration, and focus on clients’ and
communities’ aspirations and goals.
Strengths Perspective
• The main principles of the Strengths Perspective are for social workers to:
• Recognize that every individual, group, family, and community has strengths
and resources
• Engage in systematic assessment of strengths and resources
• Realize that while trauma, abuse, illness and struggle may be injurious, they
may also be sources of challenge and opportunity
• Honor client-set goals and aspirations for growth and change
• Serve clients’ and communities’ interests through collaboration with them as
directors of their own helping process
• Mobilize the strengths and resources of clients, relationships, and
environments
• Link goals to specific doable actions that activate strengths and resources
• Engage in social work with a sense of caring and hope
Empowerment Perspective
Empowerment Perspective
• The empowerment method focuses on the achievement of goals
and change of systems by utilizing available strengths, resilience,
and resources. By focusing on competence rather than deficits in
individual or social functioning, the empowerment model
supports resourcefulness and the development of skills to
remove social barriers for individuals and communities.
Empowerment Perspective
• Framed by a generalist foundation, empowerment practice
directs social workers to address challenges at all levels, including
those of individuals, families, groups, organizations,
neighborhoods, communities, and society. Empowerment is
achieved through synchronized efforts that work with – not on –
people, their relationships, and the impinging social and political
environment. These simultaneous and coordinated efforts create
a spiral of influences that initiate, sustain, and amplify
empowered functioning.
Empowerment Perspective
• Empowerment-based practice actuates a strengths perspective,
centering the social work process toward competence promotion
and away from the stigmatizing notion of deficit reduction. An
empowering approach reveals the worker's unwavering
commitment to social justice. This approach operates on the
axiom that we all benefit when we acknowledge every person's
rights and responsibilities to contribute to and receive from
community participation in a reciprocal relationship.
Empowerment Perspective
• Being empowered is not a static condition but rather a dynamic
and cyclical one. Human individual and social systems are in
perpetual motion, either "getting better" or "getting worse" at
any given moment. Empowerment indicates a simpatico state in
which one's perception of self-efficacy and essential value is
mirrored in and accentuated by social relationships and the
larger environment. Empowerment is a confluence of the
individual, the interpersonal, and the sociopolitical where the
experience of power in each sphere continually replenishes the
others.
Empowerment Perspective
• The empowered individual enters each interaction assuming
success, respect, and influence; and when these expectations are
rewarded, carries back a sense of personal control and esteem.
This realization of interpersonal success builds confidence for
interactions at the institutional level-feelings that drive
empowered people forward to assert their rights, develop their
privilege, and fashion just environments. In return, a just and
ethical society offers equal access to power which is reflected in
the lives of each individual citizen.
Empowerment Perspective
• Empowering initiatives at the individual level are supported and
sustained only by opening pathways to power sources in social,
economic, and institutional structures. Empowering initiatives at
the societal level only have benefits when those individuals and
groups previously disenfranchised rise up to meet them.
Empowerment Perspective
• To facilitate empowerment, practitioners integrate a continuum
of strategies ranging from individual development to relationship
improvement to resource acquisition and reallocation through
social and institutional change. Collaborating as partners, clients
and social workers can coordinate these efforts simultaneously
or sequentially, but no part of the ecosystemic transaction can be
ignored.
Empowerment Perspective
• Empowerment efforts at the personal level provide only brief
respite if they are not supported by complementary changes
within interpersonal and sociopolitical realms. Likewise, even
broad-based social improvements wane if not protected by the
continuing influence of empowered individuals, families, and
groups.
Spirituality and Faith
Sensitive Perspective
Spirituality and Faith Sensitive Perspective
• As a primary intervention, raising the topics of faith and religion
with individuals traumatised by terrorism and/or natural
disasters can be daunting for social workers, because victims
often enter the helping relationship with feelings of helplessness,
loss of personal control and of doubt about their relationships,
environment, and their cultural and belief systems.
Spirituality and Faith Sensitive Perspective
• Just as clients benefit from knowledge and awareness in the
aftermath of a traumatic event, insights gleaned from traumatic
experiences and from research can be useful for social workers
grappling with the challenges associated with designing and
deploying appropriate helping strategies with victims of disaster
and terrorism. This article draws on extant literature and survey
research, to explore how social workers might ethically assess
clients' spiritual perspectives and incorporate helping activities
that support clients' recovery, in the context of a spiritually
sensitive helping relationship with victims of disaster and
terrorism.
Spirituality and Faith Sensitive Perspective
• Historically, arguments for the inclusion of religion and
spirituality in social work practice and education have been
contested in numerous ways, including claims that educational
curricula are already laden in terms of content and training
protocols, and the phenomenon of religion and spirituality is
incongruous with the tenets of logical empiricism (Barker and
Floersch, 2010; Canda and Furman, 1999; Moss, 2005). This
article follows common trends in social work and related fields to
distinguish spirituality and religion as related but distinct
concepts (e.g. Canda and Furman, 2010; Johnson, 2013; Koenig,
2007; Moss, 2005).
Spirituality and Faith Sensitive Perspective
• Spirituality refers to religious and non-religious ways that people
search for a sense of meaning, purpose, moral frameworks and
connection with what they believe is most profound or sacred.
Religion refers to organised spiritually oriented beliefs, rituals
and practices shared by a community. In this usage, the term
‘spirituality’ includes religious and non-religious expressions.
However, the terms ‘religion’ and ‘spirituality’ are sometimes
used separately in order to highlight distinctions between the
religious and non-religious expressions of spirituality (Canda,
1990a, 1990b; Canda and Furman, 1999, 2010).
Ethno-Cultural Perspective
Ethno-Cultural Perspective
• Ethnocultural perspectives aim to sensitize social workers to the
relationship between ethnicity and culture, while oppression
perspectives examine the consequences of prejudice and power.
The "vulnerable life situation" perspectives consider how
practitioners can learn from clients about the impact of different
vulnerabilities and strengths.
Ethno-Cultural Perspective
• At the heart of these diversity perspectives are the strengths and
empowerment frameworks. Though familiar in any social work
program, this text addresses their specific relevance to diversity
issues. The other frameworks consist of ethnic-sensitivity, value
orientation, ethnic minority, dual perspective,
ethnic-centered/afrocentric, social justice, ethnography,
communication, feminism and constructivism.
References
• https://www.basw.co.uk/professional-development/professional-capabilities-framework-pcf/the-pcf/
strategic-social-worker/diversity-and-equality#:~:text=Diversity%20is%20multi%2Ddimensional%20and,of
%20these%20and%20other%20characteristics.
• https://socwel.ku.edu/principles-strengths-perspective#:~:text=The%20Strengths%20Perspective%20is
%20an,center%20of%20the%20helping%20process.
• https://www.sau.edu/master-of-social-work/empowerment-method#:~:text=Empowerment%20indicates
%20a%20simpatico%20state,relationships%20and%20the%20larger%20environment.
• https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC4985726/
• https://scholarworks.wmich.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=3019&context=jssw