Engagement and Assessment of Communities
Working with entire communities and organizations might seem overwhelming, due to the large number of people involved. Where do you begin? It might be a relief to know that the GIM is just as useful to social workers practicing at the macro level as it is for those practicing at the micro and mezzo levels. In fact, you begin the process in the same way with proper engagement and the appropriate form of assessment before enacting an intervention. Successful engagement and assessment depends on strong interpersonal skills, regardless of the level of intervention. In some respects, skills such as empathy, warmth, genuineness, and general rapport-building are the same for macro work as they are for micro and mezzo work—they just may be applied in a different way. In other respects, this level of intervention depends on additional skills not often identified as social work-related, including negotiating, mediating, assessing, and budgeting. How might you utilize these skills when engaging and assessing communities? A competent and successful social work policy practitioner is able to meld these skills. This is of particular necessity when the goal is social change.
For this Assignment, review this week’s Resources. Refer to the community you selected for this week’s Discussion. Then imagine that you have been assigned to complete a needs assessment and identify potential resources for this community. You elected to interview key informants as one form of assessing this community. Consider who you would contact as a key informant for this community. Finally, think about how you might engage the informant to obtain the community details to complete your needs assessment.
Assignment: (2- to 4-page paper in APA format). Do not use “I” statements.
Your paper should include the following:
- A description of the community you selected
- A description of the key informants you would contact within that community
- An explanation of why you would contact the key informants you selected
- An explanation of the skills you might use to engage these informants to obtain the community details to complete your needs assessment and explain why you chose those skills.
Support your Assignment with specific references to the Resources. Be sure to provide full APA citations for your references.
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