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This collection focuses on the relationship between social care, community, and citizenship, linking them in a way relevant to both policy and practice. It explores key concepts, policies, issues, and relationships, and draws on contrasting illustrations from England and Scotland. The authors examine the ethics of care, exploring the theoretical and moral complexities for both those receiving and those delivering it. The book also incorporates practice-based chapters on anti-social behaviour, domestic violence, community capacity to care, black and minority ethnic care, volunteering, befriending, and home care, and provides international comparisons and perspectives, with chapters from Sweden, Germany, and Japan.

To what extent are the ideas and practice of community development across Europe similar? This book explores this question with special reference to the UK and Hungary and shows how community development connects powerfully with civil society, a concept that today has global significance. The book argues that community development is both a profession and a social movement and is relevant to a wide range of issues. Chapters interweave case studies with discussion of principles and theory.

Through a comparative analysis of American and British community development since 1968, this book aims to examine how key political and policy debates social justice and social welfare and how it has been inscribed onto and embodied within the theories and practices of community development in America and Britain. First, through a comparative historical analysis of community development discourses in America and Britain since 1968, this book examines the changing nature of community development and map the competitions and contentions between different conceptions and practices of community development in each country. Second, this book analyses the changing identities of community, practitioner and policy actors over time and in each country. The micropolitics of community development is explored in detail, along with key concepts and framework for identifying and analysing community development discourses across time and national contexts.

This book blends theory and practice-based case studies to review how different community development approaches can empower minority ethnic communities to confront racism and overcome social, economic, and political disadvantage. The book explores key questions about the empowerment and capacity-building of minority ethnic groups. Using case studies from across the ‘developed’ world, and in differing social and economic contexts, the book explores these issues in working with asylum-seeker communities, addressing tensions between minorities and building alliances, in work with Gypsy, Roma and Traveller communities, and using arts-based approaches. The book will stimulate wider debates about the role of community development in relation to ‘race’ and ethnicity at a time when ‘race’ is being ‘invisibilised’ in public policy, and will be an invaluable resource for policy-makers, politicians, academics, and students from many disciplines.

This book provides an in-depth study of how community development can contribute to tackling social exclusion. It draws on the outcomes of a project funded by the Social Inclusion Programme of the European Union and managed by a European network of community development organisations — the Combined European Bureau for Social Development. It includes the analyses of the experiences of local communities; identifies and explains the key principles that are needed to underpin programmes and projects that use a community-based approach to tackling social exclusion; and provides a summary of key action points that are needed to be considered by organisations and agencies. Examples from policy and practice in the UK, Spain, Belgium, Sweden and Norway are discussed, with additional information from Denmark, Ireland and Hungary. The principles and methods discussed give a valuable insight into how the voices of local people and practitioners can be heard in policy and decision making forums.

We live in changing and challenging times. After the financial crash, the Arab Spring and the Occupy Movement many people are looking for social alternatives based on vibrant and powerful communities. For over 50 years community organising has offered a realistic way forward for improving people's lives. This book is the first to explore the diverse history of community organising, telling stories of how it developed, its successes and failures, and the lessons that can be applied today. It analyses contemporary examples of practice from the USA, UK, India, South Africa, Cambodia and Australia against both wider theoretical frameworks and their ability to contribute to sustainable social change. This book will be useful for a wide range of practitioners, students and researchers engaged in the struggle to develop new ways of building communities.

This book brings together contributions from a range of social welfare settings, including child welfare, unemployment, mental health and substance abuse treatment, to examine how the ambitions of interprofessional collaboration and service user participation are realised or challenged in multi-agency meetings. It provides empirically grounded analyses of specific aspects of multi-agency work and offers a distinctive conceptual framework for understanding and analysing interaction during meetings in social welfare settings. Based on audio and video recordings of actual meetings, the authors examine examples of exchanges between service users and social welfare professionals and demonstrate how the realisation of collaborative and integrated welfare policy is contingent on effective interactional practices between professionals and service users.

Recent policy trends have moved the principle of community involvement to the centre of the UK government's social inclusion, neighbourhood renewal and health development programmes. The challenges to managers involved in such work are addressed directly by this book. The book provides material on a key — and neglected — aspect of the government's agenda: how organisations can work effectively in communities and in partnership with local community groups. It brings together contributions on the meaning, principles and application of managing community practice. Its distinctive feature is its focus on the role and skills needed by managers if ambitious regeneration and social inclusion programmes are to work in communities.

This is a book that challenges contemporary images of place. Too often we are told about deprived neighbourhoods but rarely do the people who live in those communities get to shape the agenda and describe, from their perspective, what is important to them. In this book the process of re-imagining comes to the fore in a fresh and contemporary look at one UK town, Rotherham. Using history, artistic practice, writing, poetry, autobiography, and collaborative ethnography, this book literally and figuratively re-imagines a place. It is a manifesto for alternative visions of community, located in histories and cultural reference points that often remain unheard within the mainstream media. As such, the book presents a how to for researchers interested in community collaborative research and accessing alternative ways of knowing and voices in marginalised communities.

Amidst a context in which the burden of early-years care continues to fall heavily on women, Sharing Care examines the experiences of the minority of fathers who take on an equal or greater share of caregiving for babies and young children. Drawing on detailed qualitative research in the UK, the book outlines the nature of equal and primary carer fathers’ experiences, paying particular attention to what prompted them to take on their unusual roles, how they and their families adjusted over time and the nature of the challenges they encountered. The authors argue that, for many such fathers, taking on an equal or primary care role represented a significant and unexpected shift in their horizons and the beginning of a journey towards experiencing themselves as largely interchangeable with their partners in their role as parents. Yet the book also explores how cultural and practical context around them generated challenges to the development of fathers’ caregiving, leaving certain responsibilities still centred on mothers. The book’s conclusions highlight the potential for fatherhoods and masculinities to be transformed by the experience of taking on of everyday care responsibilities, but also how such journeys can be constrained by enduring assumptions of default maternal responsibility that remain embedded in understandings, interactions and policy.

This unique book provides an international comparison of labour markets, migrant professionals and immigration policies, and their interaction in relation to social work. Case studies based on the latest research from the UK, Ireland, Canada, New Zealand and Australia allow readers to make critical comparisons and gain understanding of the global nature of the social work profession. Detailed analysis covers the opportunities and challenges presented by labour market mobility, the implications for social justice and discussion of the experiences and perceptions of transnational social workers. Essential reading for social work educators, academics and professionals, this book will also inform the development of relevant policy, professional, and educational responses to the phenomenon of transnational social work mobility.

Since the publication of the first edition of this book there has been a growing recognition in practice and policy of how networks contribute to the vitality of community life and civil society. Government policy has increasingly emphasised the need to involve communities in decision making, while social capital is increasingly associated with health, low levels of crime, educational achievement and a strong ‘sense of community’. This book aims to strengthen and extend informal networks, support partnership working across boundaries and promote social cohesion. It explores the concept of ‘community’ in relation to patterns of interaction, social identity and mutual influence, advocating a new model of community development that promotes networking as a skilled and strategic intervention and providing recommendations for good networking practice. This updated second edition includes new ideas drawn from recent research on social capital and the policy context for community practice, reflecting the increasing emphasis on community engagement and empowerment. Recent case studies and examples have been added throughout.

The current economic crisis with its gloomy implications for lost generations leaves many disadvantaged young people with ever diminishing opportunities. Violent youth protests in many countries have been widely reported and different approaches called for. The Youth Empowerment Partnership Programme (YEPP) is a fully evaluated on-going international programme, funded by a consortium of American and European foundations, that has been operating and developing for over 10 years. The first phase - YEPP I – had a strong focus on evaluating the impact of YEPP in order to determine whether this approach would work in an international context. As a result YEPP's concept of change and structure were implemented in six European countries. YEPP aims to empower young people and the communities in which they live by making them central to new decision-making processes involving partnerships between public, private and independent sectors. Learning from the YEPP I evaluation, YEPP II implemented several measures to improve the approach and methodology and expanded YEPP in more than eight European countries with 18 Local Programme Sites stressing the strengthening of partnerships, sustainability and policy advocacy. Youth and community empowerment in Europe provides the theoretical context for this programme and gives a full account of the process and outcomes of over ten years of joint effort in its unique development and research process. The book also reflects upon the lessons learnt for future policy, including developing effective evaluation strategies. It will appeal to practitioners, researchers, policymakers and decision-makers in foundations.

The book critically engages with neo-liberal policies and media representations of youth austerity as a constructed social crisis but remaining the mechanism used by both government and media to exert control over young adults; It explores the diversity of intersections relating to youth marginality across social class, gender and racial boundaries; looking into contemporary theory of advanced youth marginality. It challenges the dominant notions of youth ‘underclass’ and marginalisation and the representation of ‘youth as trouble’ through participatory research methods to project young people’s ‘real’ experience and voice in spheres of leisure and recreation from street corners to open spaces in relation to surveillance and sanctions; It develops an understanding of the importance of personal, emotional, familial and collective experiences of poverty and austerity and the strategies of resistance and survival, or consent under social hardship and discrimination from the Police; It critically assesses the dynamics of social, cultural and educational policies in the shaping social life of young adults as refugees, looked after young people in Care, young mothers, working class youth and young people from diverse ethnic backgrounds, with reference to contemporary debates on neo-liberalism.

In a period where social unrest manifests itself through the coincidence with young people's dissatisfaction with formal political involvement and the diversification of protest movements across the globe, the question of youth participation is at the forefront of democratic societies. This book aims to investigate the extent and conditionality of young people's active citizenship. What conditions are imposed on young people's citizenship? How are young people treated in a society that extols such citizenship and how do they subjectively experience active citizenship? Part 1 examines official and unofficial constructions of participation by young people in a range of socio-political domains, exploring the motivations and rationales, underlying official attempts to increase participation among young people, and offering a critique of their effectiveness. Based on original research data, the three next parts provide a thorough analysis of participation initiatives at the implementation level giving a transversal approach to various areas of youth participation (civic, formal and informal education, ICT, learning, youth culture). Part 2 presents national and local policies for youth participation. Part 3 explores young people agencies in the creation of new spaces of participation. Part 4 analyses the recurring link between participation and learning. Drawing on examples of youth participation carried out across European countries, the book analyses the results of structure on youth participation and the effects of youth agencies on the types of mobilisation.