Developing Social Work Competencies to Empower Challenging Communities: From an Empty Foyer to a Shared Social Space

Abstract

The chapter offers a descriptive analysis of an enhanced integration project in Hervanta, one of the largest multicultural suburbs in Finland. The focus of this chapter is on how social work competencies developed in a process of collaborative learning. The three-year pilot project aimed at enhancing refugee integration into Finnish society through community social work and two-way integration. The project established a community drop-in centre, Kototori, where a social worker and social instructor worked to develop community initiatives and local projects. Social work basic competencies transformed in the dialogical process of collaborative learning and emancipatory social development. This required analytical thinking and stepping outside the city's institutional framework for adult social work. This meant deconstructing power relations between individuals, community members and social workers. The approach included analysing both the community and individual residents' needs, treating people as equal partners, developing possibilities to participate and offering new meaningful roles to service users, in effect creating an experimental working culture. The transformation of professional competence was classified into four competency elements: forming relationship-based social work, promoting a sense of community and community-based social work, experimentation and shared action for social change and finally creativity and analytical thinking.