Joining with a Community

          I have to say something I really appreciate seeing in one of our texts, and something we have discussed in multiple courses, is the idea of "joining" with others, and how to understand and work with a community from a social work standout, which may be quite different than a more distant, objective or anthropological approach. I believe this is one of the hardest skills to impart verbally, how to work with the community in this way while maintaining ethical boundaries, and it is one that has come up in my work at the MAC, (the Multiple Assistance Center, a transitional living program for homeless families), quite often. It can be particularly difficult in a situation such as the MAC, where you aren't simply studying or joining with the community, but are also responsible for enforcing certain rules and standards. I think what is most valuable in this text is the idea of treatment community members as "valued human beings". The idea of doing what you would do with any other member of community, like accepting a glass of water, or learning the names of their children, goes a long way to making people feel valued as people, not just demographics or clients. This is a phenomenon I experienced when I first shared dinner with participants at the MAC, sitting at their table and asking how there day was going, not just asking how there program was going, or housing, or MAC requirements, but just what I would ask any other person I might be having a meal with. I started realizing that the more I tried to balance my tense interactions, (enforcing rules, broaching uncomfortable topics), with these genuine attempts at joining with the community, the more effective I was, and so long as I was being truly genuine, there was no need for this to negatively effect my ability to enforce rules. There is a difference between attempting to gain entry into a community to make one's job easier, perhaps to even manipulate community members into helping achieve your own goals, and to truly seek to do so in order to join with the community, better understand it's needs, and be as efficacious as possible in supporting those needs being met.