When the Problem Does Not Belong to the Individual Alone
Community Work as Practical Philosophy
Social work often begins with a person asking for help. It may be someone without employment, without a secure home, or without sufficient means to live. It may be a person experiencing loneliness, discrimination, or powerlessness in encounters with public services. The problem appears within an individual life and takes on a personal form. It is therefore natural to look for an individual solution.
But what happens when many people present the same problems? What if these difficulties are caused not primarily by shortcomings in the individual, but by the organization of the labour market, housing policy, inaccessible services, or society’s ideas about who is considered normal, worthy, and wanted?
Then helping one person at a time is no longer enough.
This is the fundamental insight of community work: A problem can be experienced individually while also being socially produced. A person without a home experiences the insecurity personally, but homelessness cannot be understood independently of the housing market. A person excluded from working life must live with the consequences, but that exclusion may also result from the way working life is organized. A person who is not heard by the welfare system may begin to doubt their own worth, even though the problem actually lies in the system’s inability to listen.
Community work is therefore more than a method within social work. It is also a form of practical philosophy. It asks not only how people can adapt to the world as it exists, but also what kind of world we ought to create together.
From a Personal Problem to a Shared Experience
Individual social work has been, and will continue to be, a necessary part of social work practice. People need help in concrete life situations. They need someone who listens, understands, offers guidance, communicates their rights, and opens doors that would otherwise remain closed.
The problem arises when the individual perspective becomes dominant. Socially produced difficulties may then be interpreted as personal deficiencies. Unemployment becomes a lack of motivation. Poverty becomes poor financial management. Social isolation becomes a lack of social competence. Powerlessness in the face of the welfare system becomes an inability to cooperate.
In this way, despite its good intentions, social work may come to individualize problems that have political, economic, and cultural causes. Individuals are made responsible for mastering situations they have created only to a very limited extent.
Community work attempts to move our understanding in the opposite direction. It does not begin by relieving people of responsibility, but by asking what responsibility can reasonably be placed upon the individual. It examines how personal experiences are connected to the conditions under which people live.
When several people discover that they share the same experiences, their understanding of the problem may also change. What was previously carried as private shame can be recognized as a shared social experience. “There is something wrong with me” can be replaced by the question: “What is it about the conditions of our lives that causes so many of us to experience this?”
This transition is decisive. A person who sees themselves as the problem will usually seek to change themselves. People who discover that they share a problem may begin to ask whether their surroundings should also be changed.
The Humanly Created Society
Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann described society as a humanly created reality. Human beings create institutions, languages, roles, rules, and customs. Gradually, these arrangements appear to exist independently of us. They confront new generations as an already established reality: This is how working life is organized. This is how the welfare system operates. This is how housing is distributed. This is how a normal person is expected to live.
We easily forget that what appears self-evident has a history. It has emerged through human choices, power relations, and practices. These arrangements could have been different, and they can still be changed.
This insight provides community work with a philosophical foundation. If society were a state of nature, social work could only help people adapt to what cannot be changed. But when society is understood as humanly created, change also becomes possible. The institutions that restrict human agency are not laws of nature. They are social constructions that can be examined, criticized, and transformed.
At the same time, human beings are themselves shaped by the society into which they are born. We learn which lives are regarded as successful, which voices are heard, and which people are expected to be grateful for the help they receive. Society’s judgements may gradually become part of a person’s own self-understanding. Someone who is repeatedly treated as less competent may begin to see themselves in the same way.
Community work is therefore concerned both with changing external conditions and with freeing our understanding from ideas that make unjust conditions appear natural and unavoidable.
From Recipient to Participant
Within welfare services, people are often described as service users. The term was intended to mark a departure from the more passive role of the client. Yet a service user can also be reduced to the recipient of services that others have defined, designed, and decided upon.
Participation involves more than being asked whether one is satisfied with a service that has already been completed. Genuine participation means being involved in understanding the problem, formulating the goals, and designing the measures intended to address it. Those who must live with the consequences of a decision must also be able to influence how that decision is made.
Here, social work encounters a fundamental question in practical philosophy: Should a person primarily be treated as the object of another’s care, or as an acting subject in their own life? Martin Buber’s distinction between I–Thou and I–It illuminates this tension. Social work cannot avoid investigating, assessing, and categorizing, but the other person must never be reduced to these categories. In the I–Thou encounter, the other appears as an independent human being—not merely as a client, service user, or object of an intervention.
It is possible to wish another person well while simultaneously depriving them of influence. The helper may be so convinced of what is best that the other person’s experiences become subordinate to professional understanding. Care may then slide into paternalism. The person receiving help is seen, but not necessarily heard.
Community work seeks to create a different relationship. Those affected should not merely constitute the target group of an intervention; they should participate as partners in the work. This is not simply a question of finding more effective solutions. It is a matter of dignity.
To be listened to is to be recognized as a person who possesses knowledge about their own life. Experiential knowledge is not the same as professional knowledge, but neither is it less real. It reveals how institutions, regulations, and services actually affect people’s everyday lives. A service may be well designed in an office and still be experienced as inaccessible by those for whom it was created.
Participation therefore requires more than the professional making room for the other person’s voice. It also requires a willingness to allow that voice to have consequences.
The Social Worker as Catalyst
The task of the community worker is not to conduct other people’s struggles on their behalf. It is to help people develop their own collective capacity for action. The social worker becomes less an expert on other people’s lives and more a catalyst for processes that others must own.
A catalyst sets something in motion without itself becoming the purpose of that movement. The social worker may contribute knowledge about systems, rights, and decision-making processes. She may establish contact, bring people together, coordinate cooperation, document problems, and make experiences visible. She may act as an inspirer, supporter, and mediator. At times, she must also be willing to serve as a lightning rod when frustrations and conflicts emerge.
This requires a particular form of professional restraint. The professional must use her knowledge without taking control of the process. If the social worker defines the problem, formulates the goal, chooses the means, and represents the group publicly, the work may be efficient, but it is unlikely to be empowering. People are then mobilized to participate in the professional’s project rather than supported in creating their own.
Empowerment refers to the mobilization of strength, competence, and agency. But power cannot simply be given by those who already possess it. If the helper presents herself as the person who bestows power upon others, the very asymmetry that empowerment was intended to overcome is maintained.
The social worker’s task is instead to help create conditions in which people can discover, develop, and exercise the power found in their experiences, communities, and rights. It is not a matter of making the powerless powerful through professional intervention, but of reducing the conditions that produce powerlessness.
Critical Awareness and Action
Paulo Freire’s liberating pedagogy makes an important contribution to our understanding of community work. For Freire, knowledge was not something the expert deposited into an ignorant person. Knowledge developed through dialogue and critical reflection upon the world in which people lived.
In this context, conscientization means learning to read society, not merely words. It involves discovering the connections between one’s own experiences and the organization of society. Reflection alone, however, is insufficient. Understanding must be capable of leading to action, and action must in turn become the subject of renewed reflection.
Community work therefore brings together investigation, dialogue, organization, and action. People meet, share experiences, and explore whether problems that appear to be isolated have common causes. They formulate goals, establish cooperation, and attempt to create change. This may take place through mutual-aid initiatives, advocacy groups, documentation, neighbourhood projects, efforts to influence municipal planning, or public campaigns.
Mutual aid must be understood here as more than individuals learning to help themselves. It can be a collective practice in which people help one another to understand and influence their situation. The community breaks through isolation and makes experience politically visible.
The personal and the political are not opposites. The personal reveals how social conditions operate within a lived life. The political reveals that this life forms part of a world we share with others.
Conflict as Possibility
Social work is commonly associated with cooperation, care, and problem-solving. Conflict may therefore be experienced as a sign that the work has failed. But community work concerns the distribution of power, benefits, burdens, and recognition. Conflict can therefore hardly be avoided.
Not all conflicts are beneficial. They can bring situations to a standstill, damage relationships, and make cooperation impossible. Yet the absence of visible conflict is not necessarily evidence of justice. It may mean that the weaker party has given up, does not dare to protest, or lacks a language through which to express their experience.
Conflict can make concealed contradictions visible. When people without housing organize themselves, they challenge not only an administrative practice but also assumptions about who deserves to live where. When people with disabilities demand accessibility, buildings, transport systems, and institutions are revealed as having been designed for particular kinds of bodies. When service users criticize a welfare service, their criticism may show that the service’s understanding of need does not correspond with people’s own experiences.
Conflict may then become a driving force in the development of something new.
The social worker may find herself in a difficult intermediate position. She is employed by an organization while also being committed to the values of her profession. She is expected to remain loyal to her employer while also working for social justice and human dignity. She has a duty of confidentiality but may become aware of conditions that ought to be made visible. She must cooperate with the system while sometimes having to criticize it.
This dilemma cannot be resolved by a simple rule. It requires professional judgement and ethical discernment. The question is not only, “What am I legally permitted to say?” It is also, “Who will be harmed if I remain silent, and what responsibility do I have for what I now know?”
Loyalty cannot mean obedience without reflection. An organization that is never challenged by its own employees may protect its routines at the expense of the people it was created to help. At the same time, criticism must be informed, responsible, and directed towards substantive conditions. Courage is not the same as recklessness. But caution must not become another word for silence.
When Power Divides
Freire described “divide and rule” as a means of maintaining power. When groups with shared interests are brought into conflict with one another, the possibility of collective action is weakened. Attention is directed sideways, towards other groups in vulnerable situations, rather than upwards, towards the arrangements that produce scarcity and inequality.
This can happen when people with limited resources are portrayed as competitors for the same scarce goods. Local residents may be set against people in need of housing. Unemployed people may be set against migrant workers. One disadvantaged group may be blamed for another group’s failure to receive sufficient help.
Community work must therefore do more than mobilize solidarity within a particular group. It must also examine how that group’s interests can be understood in relation to the interests of others. Otherwise, efforts to empower some may contribute to the further marginalization of others.
There is no innocent position outside these tensions. Even well-intentioned interventions may have unintended consequences. They may stigmatize those they were intended to help, create new divisions, or exclude others. Community work must therefore continually ask a critical question: Who is included through this intervention, and who risks being left outside?
This question leads us back to the ethical core of community work, which can be expressed through a small but decisive linguistic distinction: The social worker should not merely work for people, but with them.
Working for someone may be necessary. In acute situations, the professional must act, protect, and assume responsibility. But if help is always designed for the other person, that person risks remaining a recipient. Working together, by contrast, means recognizing that knowledge, responsibility, and initiative must be shared.
This is demanding because the social worker never encounters the other person on entirely equal terms. The professional has education, knowledge of the system, access to institutions, and often the authority to make or influence decisions. This power does not disappear simply because the relationship is described as a partnership. Precisely for that reason, it must be made visible and exercised with care.
Practical philosophy is concerned not only with the values we profess, but with how those values become visible in action. It is easy to say that we believe in participation. What matters is what happens when the other person wants something different from what the professional believes to be best. It is easy to support freedom of expression in principle. The real test comes when criticism is directed at our own institution. It is easy to speak about empowerment. The question is whether we can also tolerate people using their newly developed agency in ways we cannot control.
The Art of Making Oneself Less Necessary
A community work project must eventually come to an end. This can be difficult because relationships, expectations, and dependencies have developed along the way. But if the work has become entirely dependent upon the social worker, it has not succeeded in its most important task.
The goal must be for knowledge, organization, and collective agency to continue without the professional who initiated the process. This requires planning, clarity, and a responsible conclusion. Participants must know when the social worker’s role will end, who will assume responsibility for particular tasks, and how the experiences gained will be documented and communicated.
Ending the work is not merely an administrative act. It is also an ethical test. The professional must be able to step back. Perhaps the community worker’s greatest professional skill is precisely the ability to contribute to processes that eventually make her own leadership unnecessary.
This does not mean that the relationships were unimportant. An ending may be marked because something significant has taken place: People have met, shared experiences, and created something together. Yet the intervention must also be examined critically as it draws to a close. Has it strengthened those it was intended to strengthen? Has it created new forms of dependency? Has anyone been overlooked? Does the intervention promote inclusion, or has it established new boundaries between those who belong and those who do not?
Community work is never completed once and for all. Every solution creates new experiences that must, in turn, be examined.
A Social Work That Also Changes Society
Social work always exists within the tension between the individual and society. The profession must help people live in the world as it exists, but it cannot limit itself to this task. It must also ask whether that world is just and for whom it has been designed.
If social work merely helps people adapt to unjust conditions, it may unintentionally contribute to maintaining them. If, on the other hand, the profession only criticizes social structures, it may lose sight of the concrete human being. Community work must hold both perspectives together: the individual’s lived experience and the social conditions within which that experience arises.
Here, community work reveals itself as practical philosophy. It does not begin with abstract questions about the good and just society, but with people’s experiences of the world in which they actually live. Philosophy becomes practical when these experiences are examined collectively and translated into action.
The decisive question is therefore not only how we can help people who have been marginalized. We must also ask how marginalization is produced, which institutions sustain it, and how those affected can participate in changing it.
Community work rests upon a demanding but hopeful conviction: Society is not finished. It continues to be created through our actions, our institutions, and our ways of encountering one another. It can therefore also become different.
But change cannot be created by the social worker alone. It must be developed together with those who have encountered society’s boundaries through their own lives. The social worker’s task is to listen, connect, make visible, and support—and sometimes to stand beside people as they find their own voices and begin to act together.
Social work is then no longer merely a way of helping people live within society.
It also becomes a way of creating it.
This essay is based on the author’s lecture “Community Work,” with Gunn Strand Hutchinson’s book Samfunnsarbeid: Mobilisering og deltagelse i sosialfaglig arbeid (Community Work: Mobilization and Participation in Social Work, 2010) as its principal source. Perspectives from Peter L. Berger and Thomas Luckmann, Paulo Freire, and Martin Buber have been incorporated into the practical-philosophical development of the lecture. The text was written in conversation with OpenAI/ChatGPT and Claude/Anthropic.
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