This contributed volume offers a holistic understanding of social work practice in deprived communities through its thematization of understanding deprived communities globally, the development of competencies for social work practice in and with deprived communities, social work education as a community development tool, and the empowerment of social workers in deprived communities. Inequality as a globally recognized challenge is extensively elaborated within the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and the Global Agenda program for social work, making this a timely and important contribution to the literature.
Deprived communities, used in this book to mean slums, ghettos, favelas, and low-income, remote, underserved, vulnerable, impoverished, underdeveloped, disadvantaged, or less-favoured communities, exist worldwide and are conceptualized under different terms and concepts. For that reason, social work, specifically in deprived areas, is not sufficiently recognized as a specific field of practice within community work. As a result, this volume features contributions that:
- provide a conceptual clarification of many different terms that are used for describing deprived communities and offer a systematic literature review on community processes and effects on well-being in underdeveloped communities;
- map different fields of social work involvement in deprived communities with concrete practice examples; and,
- stress why social work as a profession needs support and how it can be empowered to improve its capacities in deprived communities.
With international authorship and perspectives on social work approaches for deprived communities from India, Sub-Saharan Africa, North and Central Europe, and North America, Practicing Social Work in Deprived Communities is an essential resource for social workers, social work educators, and community development practitioners. The text also should be of interest to students of social work, as well as other professionals and researchers working within community development and deprived communities.
Ana Opacic, PhD, is an assistant professor at the Department of Social Work within the Faculty of Law, University of Zagreb in Croatia. Her field of interest includes community social work, international social work and theory of social work. As a researcher and practitioner, she is involved in local vulnerable communities in Croatia. Ana Opacic did her PhD thesis on the conceptualization of developmentally sensitive communities in Croatia, and has published numerous articles on this topic in distinguished peer-reviewed journals. Some of the subtopics include typology of underdeveloped communities, environmental justice, social capital and post-war reconstruction.
Ana Opacic was active not solely as a researcher in deprived communities in Croatia, but was also engaged in developing service-learning programs, social services, strategic planning and evaluation of development projects. Her professional as well as personal experience is deeply connected with challenges of living in deprived communities alongside all other issues that build this experience, such as war, post-socialist transition or social inequalities.
