Reflective Essay On Social Work

Social work is often divided into three broad practice categories: micro, mezzo and macro. Micro social work deals directly at an individual level, mezzo social work involves smaller groups or institutions, whereas, macro social work involves large scale intervention at a community level. In this paper, focus shall be laid on social work practice at the macro level and therefore the emphasis would be given to communities. However, the paper shall restrict itself to only one community and would try covering the nature and various other aspects of it.

INTRODUCTION-
As a part of our field work curriculum, I was placed under Action Aid, which works in partnership with several grass root organizations and civil society groups. One such organization

Over time, it has changed from being just a professional one to being a personal one. Initially, I had to visit Golibar only during area meetings or during community FGDs along with field mobilizer or field contact person. However, from the second semester, I started making individual visits to the community to meet my field work tasks demands. These individual visits not only helped me gain an insight of the community but also helped me in understanding the nature of the community and the problems the individuals from the communities face. Moreover, these visits and the interactive sessions that I had with the community people during my visits made me understand the relevance of principle of community practice like community pace, self determination, community capacity,

Generally, as already mentioned, age old traditions restrict the activities of the women folk within the four walls of the house. Such traditions are still being followed in India even after so many years of independence. At a time, when we constantly talk about empowering women and girls, CRH thought of including Golibar under the PIE project, which tries to bring about women empowerment through providing them with life skills development training. However, bringing the women of the community together was itself a problem. Each women being individualistic in nature often had individual opinions about things, each of them had their own set of problems and explanations for not turning up for weekly area meetings for forming SHGs. In fact there were times when women training groups would form but break within a week or so due to personal conflicts. But despite so many challenges, CRH mobilizers made it a point to go to the communities and start afresh, by convincing and manipulating the women all over again to come and participate in the area meetings. All these challenges reflect the very essence of community organization practice; as a matter of fact it is only through overcoming such challenges one could master the practice of community