The Social in Social Work

What Norway Might Learn from Brazil

I still remember the first time I visited CEPAS in Brazil.

It was not a large institution.

No modern glass buildings.

No endless corridors filled with administration.

Only simple buildings in a poor neighborhood in Jacaraípe, in the state of Espírito Santo. Around us, houses stood tightly pressed together. Many families lived with unemployment, violence, poor schools, and deep insecurity. Drug trafficking and poverty were part of everyday life.

And yet there was something there that affected me deeply.

Something I gradually began to recognize in several places throughout Brazil.

An understanding that social work is first and foremost about human beings.

Not systems.

Not forms.

Not control.

But people.

A Building That Became Hope

One of the things that impressed me most about CEPAS was how the place itself came into existence.

It did not begin with large public grants or modern institutional buildings.

It began with an empty house.

An abandoned building standing unused in a poor neighborhood where people themselves had occupied small pieces of land in order to build simple corrugated metal homes.

Professor Pedro Fortes decided that this was exactly where the center should be located.

Not far away from the people.

Not at a safe distance.

But in the middle of their lives.

The local community helped renovate the building. People contributed whatever they could. Pedro used his contacts to obtain furniture and equipment. Slowly, CEPAS emerged.

Not merely as an institution.

But as a community.

Perhaps this is precisely what makes the place so special.

CEPAS was not built for the local community.

It was built together with the local community.

In the middle of a favela where many people live with poverty, violence, and insecurity, there is now a place that represents something different:

Hope.

Children come there after school.

Mothers gather there.

Students learn to understand poverty from within.

People experience what it means to be seen.

It is difficult to describe how powerful this feels when one actually stands there.

Because suddenly one understands that social work is not primarily about systems.

It is about building places where human beings can once again believe that the future exists.

CEPAS — Defending Life

CEPAS stands for Center of Studies in Promotion of Health Alternatives. The organization was founded by Professor Pedro Florêncio da Cunha Fortes at the Federal University of Espírito Santo (UFES).

Their motto is simple:

“To take initiative and defend life.”

I have thought a great deal about those words.

Because they contain something fundamental that I sometimes feel we are beginning to lose in parts of Norwegian social work.

To defend life.

Not merely administer problems.

Not merely document needs.

But actually stand beside people in their struggle for dignity.

CEPAS works with preventive health care, social integration, education, and support for families in poor communities. But what makes the project unique is the way they do it.

Students visit families in their homes.

They spend time with children.

They sit around kitchen tables.

They get to know people.

Social work does not happen at a distance.

It happens in relationships.

The Humanity of Home Visits

One of the strongest aspects of CEPAS was the home visits.

Students in medicine, nursing, and other disciplines entered areas marked by poverty, violence, and social risk. Not primarily to control people, but to understand how they lived.

This made a deep impression on me.

Because a home visit carries a unique human quality.

When you enter a person’s home, you also enter their lifeworld.

You see how children live.

How families organize everyday life.

How poverty smells, sounds, and feels.

In Norway we often speak about participation and relational work. Yet at the same time, much of social work has become increasingly bureaucratic, standardized, and screen-based.

We register.

Map.

Document.

And much of this is necessary.

But something of the human closeness can disappear.

At CEPAS, I encountered something different.

A form of social work where relationships still stood at the center.

The “Social” in Social Work

Perhaps this is one of the most important things Brazil taught me.

That social work is not primarily about methods.

It is about human closeness.

About being present in other people’s lives without reducing them to cases or diagnoses.

At CEPAS there was no sharp division between health care, social work, education, and community life. Everything was connected.

Children received education.

Mothers received support and health guidance.

Teenagers participated in dance groups and discussion groups.

Women received prenatal care and counseling.

Older adults received assistance with health issues.

Soup was prepared for the children.

Students taught classes.

At the same time, the children taught the students Portuguese.

There was something deeply human about all this.

Not charity.

Not pity.

But participation.

CEPAS was clear that the goal was not to make people dependent on help, but to strengthen their dignity and their opportunity to create a life of their own.

This strongly reminded me of Paulo Freire’s thinking.

Human beings do not grow through humiliation.

They grow through participation and dialogue.

Students Learning to See

Another thing that deeply impressed me was how the students themselves were transformed by the work.

Many students at CEPAS came from middle-class backgrounds and had little experience with the poverty-stricken communities in which they worked.

Through the home visits, they encountered people face to face.

Not as statistics.

Not as “clients.”

But as families with stories, hopes, fears, and dreams.

This changed the students.

I could see it.

They began to understand that health and social problems are never merely about individual choices.

They are also about society.

Unemployment.

Housing conditions.

Education.

Violence.

Poverty.

Freire wrote that education must help people learn to read the world — not only books.

That was exactly what I experienced at CEPAS.

The students learned to read society through encounters with human beings.

The Face of Poverty

It is difficult to describe the poverty we encountered in Brazil.

Many families lived under conditions almost unimaginable in Norway.

Unemployment.

Violence.

Poor schools.

Substance abuse.

Children spending much of their lives in the streets.

And yet we also encountered something else.

Warmth.

Vitality.

Community.

Perhaps this was precisely why CEPAS functioned so powerfully.

They did not come as experts standing above people.

They tried to become part of the community.

Not to “save” people, but to work together with them.

There is a profound difference between those two approaches.

Social Work as Community Work

In Norway, social work has gradually become increasingly individualized.

We work with individual cases.

Individual decisions.

Individual diagnoses.

Much of this is necessary.

But at the same time, we can lose sight of the community itself.

CEPAS worked differently.

They saw the family.

The neighborhood.

The children.

The schools.

The women.

The adolescents.

They tried to build communities while helping individuals.

Perhaps this is one of the most interesting aspects of Brazilian social work:

It still carries the character of community work.

Not only individual work.

Dignity Rather Than Charity

What perhaps impressed me most deeply about CEPAS was their understanding of dignity.

They did not want to create dependency.

They wanted to strengthen people’s ability to live their own lives.

That is why they combined health care with education, vocational training, and social participation.

People did not merely receive help.

They received possibilities.

This is deeply important.

Because human beings need more than care.

They need hope.

The possibility of experiencing that they still have value.

That they are still able to contribute.

What Can Norway Learn?

Brazil has enormous problems.

No one who visits the favelas can romanticize poverty.

The violence.

The inequality.

The suffering of children.

All of this is deeply serious.

And yet I believe we in Norway can learn something important from Brazilian social work.

Not necessarily the methods.

But the view of human beings.

The ability to create closeness.

The importance of community.

The understanding that social work is fundamentally relational work.

I believe many social workers in Norway already feel this.

That something of the “social” in social work is gradually disappearing into forms, deadlines, and documentation systems.

CEPAS reminded me of something fundamental:

Human beings are transformed through relationships.

Not only through systems.

Defending Life

I still think about the motto of CEPAS:

“To take initiative and defend life.”

Perhaps those words contain the very core of social work itself.

To defend life where it is most vulnerable.

In the child.

In the poor family.

In the young person at risk of being drawn into violence and crime.

In the human being gradually losing faith in their own worth.

It is easy to become cynical in our time.

Easy to believe that systems alone can solve human problems.

But perhaps we need to return to something simpler.

Something more human.

A cup of coffee around a kitchen table.

A home visit.

A conversation.

A person being truly seen.

Brazil taught me that social work can still be exactly this.

And perhaps that is why these experiences continue to live so strongly within me.

References

Freire, P. (2000). Pedagogy of the oppressed (30th anniversary ed.). New York, NY: Continuum.

Lundstøl, J. (1999). Om å gjøre andre gode. Oslo: Høgskolen i Oslo.

Wacquant, L. (2008). Urban outcasts: A comparative sociology of advanced marginality. Cambridge, England: Polity Press.

CEPAS – Center of Studies in Promotion of Health Alternatives. 

I still think about the motto of CEPAS:

“To take initiative and defend life.”

This text was written in a conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT, which also made the illustrasion