Description
Assignment: Assessment
Application
Engagement and Assessment of Communities
Working with entire communities and
organizations might seem overwhelming, due to the large number of people
involved. Where do you begin? It might be a relief to know that the GIM is just
as useful to social workers practicing at the macro level as it is for those
practicing at the micro and mezzo levels. In fact, you begin the process in the
same way with proper engagement and the appropriate form of assessment before
enacting an intervention. Successful engagement and assessment depends on
strong interpersonal skills, regardless of the level of intervention. In some
respects, skills such as empathy, warmth, genuineness, and general
rapport-building are the same for macro work as they are for micro and mezzo
work—they just may be applied in a different way. In other respects, this level
of intervention depends on additional skills not often identified as social
work-related, including negotiating, mediating, assessing, and budgeting. How
might you utilize these skills when engaging and assessing communities? A
competent and successful social work policy practitioner is able to meld these
skills. This is of particular necessity when the goal is social change.
For this Assignment, review this week’s Resources. Refer to the
community you selected for this week’s Discussion.( Dallas
in Luzerne County, Pennsylvania) Then imagine that you have been assigned to complete a needs
assessment and identify potential resources for this community. You elected to
interview key informants as one form of assessing this community. Consider who
you would contact as a key informant for this community. Finally, think about
how you might engage the informant to obtain the community details to complete
your needs assessment.
Assignment: (2- to 4-page paper
in APA format).
Your paper should include the following:
oA description of the community you selected
oA description of the key informants you would
contact within that community
oAn explanation of why you would contact the key
informants you selected
oAn explanation of the skills you might use to
engage these informants to obtain the community details to complete your needs
assessment and explain why you chose those skills.
