Social Work Empowerment Approach

Subject  > Social Science Essays  > Society and community

As an undergrad social work student at University of Texas-Arlington we are taught how to become a generalist social worker. Becoming a generalist social worker will provide us with a broad range of skills to work with micro, mezzo and macro groups from all different ethnicities, ages, and religions. Professors here at UTA teach us many different models and theories that we can use as tools to work with our clients or groups successfully. A newer social work perspective that I would like to discuss in this paper is the empowerment approach. The empowerment theory gained legitimacy as a paradigm back in 1981 by Julian Rappaport who discussed this paradigm in his Presidential Address at the American ...

... for all populations, social workers need different sets of assumptions and predictions for different populations. Furthermore, as a generalist social work student, I believe we must be responsible and have the ability to contour the empowerment paradigm and other paradigms applied in the helping process towards the individual client so that it may produce the best possible results for each client's individual situation. The empowerment theory can be and is applied at the individual, organizational, and community levels. At the organizational and community levels, empowerment involves increasing the political power of a collective group, whereas at the individual level, it involves increasing the individual's sense of control without actually affecting structural change (Hamme &

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