Community Research

I decided to enter into the field of social work because I wanted to join the fight for social justice. As an undergraduate, I took a special interest in social psychology and sociology. While taking these courses, I saw how easily the people who live in communities with lower resources, high levels of poverty, poor sanitation, ambiguous political representation, high crime and aggressive policing practices could fall into complacency and despair.
Just as an individual could become so used  to being marginalized and ineffective as an advocate for themselves that they fall into a state of "learned helplessness", I saw that entire communities could suffer the same fate collectively. This becomes a viscous cycle which is usually identified by people from high-resource communities as a sort of sickness or willful deviance on the part of their disadvantaged neighbors.
I am working as an intern at Preble Street's Florence House, which is an emergency shelter as well as a residential home and safe-havens for the chronically homeless women in the Southern Maine area. Our text book indicates that there are often problems in identifying the somewhat arbitrary boundaries that define a "community", but after working at Florence House for nearly a year now, it is clear to me that I am working in a community that is unique within the larger surrounding geographical communities in which many of the women were once a part of.
Our readings for the week identified community-based research as three different and distinct functions: Research On the community, Research In the community, and Research With the community (Weil, Reisch, & Ohmer 2013). As a student in graduate school, many of the articles that I have read over the school year have featured the plight of the homeless, drug addicted, and chronically mentally ill. In this role as a student, I am doing research On the community. As an intern during my first semester at Florence House, I was mostly working as a support staff member. I helped manage the milieu, opened lockers and showers, did laundry, and provided assistance in anyway that I could be useful throughout the day. In this capacity, I am doing research In the community.
This semester, I am learning how to do casework. As such, I enter into a partnership with clients so that together we can work to try to find resources and activities that could lead to improved health, employment, financial resources, and ultimately more secure housing. This is what I consider doing research With the community.
Next year, my internship is with the National Association of Social Workers (NASW). It is my goal to work as a Macro Practitioner in social work, so this will be an exciting opportunity for me and my development as a student and professional social worker in the future. My experience at Florence House has been very valuable research on, in, and with a community that has a need for advocacy and for people to add to their voices for justice. Each barrier that my clients and I encounter while trying to move their cases forward is like a brick wall that we need to take apart at the mortar. As we look into our bag of blunted tools, I look towards the future for when I am in Augusta working with legislators who have the power to sharpen and even provide new tools that could be more effective in taking those walls down.

References:

Weil, M., Reisch, M., & Ohmer, M. (2013). The Handbook of Community Practice. 2nd Edition.