Competency 6: Engage with Individuals, Families, Groups, Organizations, and Communities
Social workers understand that engagement is an ongoing component of the dynamic and interactive process of social work practice with and on behalf of individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities. Social workers value the importance of human relationships. Social workers understand theories of human behavior and person-in-environment and critically evaluate and apply this knowledge to facilitate engagement with clients and constituencies, including individuals, families, groups, organizations, and communities. Social workers are self-reflective and understand how bias, power, and privilege as well as their personal values and personal experiences may affect their ability to engage effectively with diverse clients and constituencies. Social workers use the principles of interprofessional collaboration to facilitate engagement with clients, constituencies, and other professionals as appropriate.
Social workers:
a. apply knowledge of human behavior and person-in-environment, as well as interprofessional conceptual frameworks, to engage with clients and constituencies; and
b. use empathy, reflection, and interpersonal skills to engage in culturally responsive practice with clients and constituencies.
Competency #6 In Practice
Engagement is how we accomplish everything we set out to do in social work, but it is not only the means, by also the end goal of what we seek to do. We, as social workers, formally support our clients and engage with them as such. We also, in our community organizing and one-on-one therapeutic practice to our group work, seek to strengthen the informal social networks of our clients. To help them engage in their families and communities with more meaningful quality relationships. The importance of community has been well documented, and we must go about the work of engaging with the utmost care and respect for different cultures and with an understanding of how our background impacts our assumptions and what others assume about us. This competency challenges me as a social worker to not just think of engagement as a means but as one of the most important threads weaving itself throughout everything I do. I will remain committed to this competency by keeping engagement at the forefront of everything I do and learning about the different cultures I interact with by reading books and research articles on unique challenges faced by specific ethnic, gender, and racial groups.
Evidence from class work:
In this Social Marketing Presentation for our social work practice in groups class, my partner and I demonstrated our ability to engage with a population by creating a strategy to target the demographic our support group was created for. We created flyers that were relevant to the people we wanted to recruit and planned to target platforms that were used by the group we were trying to reach out to. In our initial meeting, we planned icebreakers to form connections with our clients and activities to help them understand our topic of resilience. We engaged with clients in the structure of the meeting we planned and in the recruitment materials for our support group. In this worksheet we analyzed our target demographic and established goals for our overarching arc.
Evidence from field:
In this Redacted Court Report I summarized my findings from assessing the housing and facility adequacy for a client’s potential custodian. Home visits are the time in my practicum that I most deeply connect and engage with my clients. Through phone calls, I am able to get a lot of information and connect on a verbal level, but by conducting home visits, I get to enter into their life for a little bit. By seeing where they live, how they live, and what normal looks like for them, I better understand who they are, a little piece of their life, and what is important to them. These conversations are often the first time they tell me the back story of a case, and I am able to deeply connect with my clients. By providing empathetic, active listening to the stories of the children and their custodians, I connect with my clients and make them feel heard. Through conducting home visits during my case management at CASA, I demonstrated a mastery of engaging with my clients and their families.
Other evidence:
I volunteered at a children’s home in Bolivia, Familia Feliz, for ten months in 2021. I helped out as a houseparent and English teacher. I got to engage with the children as a caretaker and teacher and see the importance of human relationships in a memorable way. In this video from Familia Feliz, I am explaining the need for more stable staff and recruiting houseparents from the local community who can provide the children with more stability than rotating international volunteers. During my time in Bolivia, I demonstrated my commitment to the importance of human relationships not only in the relationships I fostered but in advocating for more stability in the children’s caregiving relationships. While I can not put the relationships, I developed with everyone at the children’s home into concrete evidence I chose this video because it shows me interacting with the kids and shows a little piece of the engagement that was so critical to my work there. During my time volunteering at Familia Feliz, I developed an increased capacity to form empathetic cross-cultural relationships and demonstrated a mastery of engagement in this setting.