The focus on development in social work

Résumé

Social work needs to increasingly become a developmental process. Providing interventions solely during crises can lead the individual, the family, the group into an unwanted state of dependency. At the same time, social work needs to become a learning process, aiming to improve skills, to prevent, to provide the individual with the abilities needed in order to escape dependency. Here, the receiver of social services can have increasing responsibilities, the same way his/her family, the community and last but not least, the social worker can have increased responsibilities: he/she has to learn to identify the needs at local level, to build strategies and to engage all the available resources.