The Impact of Community Work: How to Gather Evidence, Mark Doel

Extract

My own first foray into community work, as a social worker, was to call a public meeting in the ward where our neighbourhood social work team had newly set up, devolved from central office. The meeting was well-attended, and the first question from the floor was, ‘what are you going to do about all the dog dirt on the pavements?’ It was far from what we had anticipated as an opening topic, but it opened my eyes to the fact that the ‘community’ is complex and diverse and that much of the work of anyone working in the community is to help it to find one voice, whilst allowing the many.

As a social worker, I worked alongside community workers, sharing office space and geographical patch. When the Labour city council temporarily lost control, the first act of the new Lib Dem administration was to chop all the community workers. They all lost their jobs and the city lost its service. I would be fascinated to know what the impact of the community workers had been that led to their being wiped out by the incoming administration and, of course, what the impact of their removal was on the city. This is ‘impact’ on an asteroid scale.