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Generalist Social Practice with Organizations and Communities

Consider the communities that support or inhibit your clients.

As a social worker, you will interact with a number of environments, including institutions, organizations, neighborhoods, and communities. These are the places your clients come into contact with and rely on in their daily lives. In SOWK 6325 Generalist Social Practice with Organizations and Communities, you will gain a better understanding of these settings in order to understand your clients’ experiences and needs.

Course Description

As you develop the leadership qualities needed to be a macro social work practitioner, you will also learn to use micro practice and group skills when working in organizations and communities. You will focus on how social workers and others can bring about organizational change in their communities, including guidelines for assessing the potential for such change and, if feasible, steps for organizing and implementing change.

In your career, it’s critical that you learn as much as possible about a given neighborhood or community, its strengths and challenges, and key players you can involve as you work together toward community change. Social workers can play a big role in positive change efforts in communities, improving the lives of individual community members.

You will examine the evaluation and advocacy skills needed to advocate for institutional change, as well as the ethical challenges you many face when providing services to clients and client systems. Developing and managing agency resources can include working with the media, and SOWK 6325 will teach you methods for becoming comfortable with the press.

While it is a very rewarding and critically important job, being a social worker can also be very stressful. Clients often have many issues that can be both painful and challenging to address. If you don’t take care of yourself during your career, you won’t be able to be effective for your clients. You will look at techniques for both stress management and time management to ensure your long-term well-being and effectiveness.

Sample Learning Exercise

You will conduct a “Community Treasure Hunt,” gathering demographic data about a specific community and the services available to its families and children in need. You will immerse yourself in that community by walking through neighborhoods and visiting social services agencies and other relevant community facilities, using only resources available to a typical low-income client. You will then complete a paper describing your findings.

Assignment Example

Create a case study based on individuals in your assigned course text book. Your case study will describe the impact of poverty and the environment that contributes to poverty and oppression. You will make recommendations for improvement or change.

Course Topics

Throughout each week of the course, you will focus on a core topic or theme. Sample topics are listed below and are subject to change based on the instructor.

  • Critical Thinking Revisited and Macro Social Work
  • Micro Skills in the Macro Practice
  • Social Work Practice in the Organizational Setting
  • Understanding Neighborhoods and Communities
  • Self-Care and Catch-Up
  • Evaluation and Advocacy
  • Ethics and Supervision Macro Practice
  • Administration and Macro Practice

Learning Outcomes

In SOWK 6325, you will gain a better understanding of topics specific to professional social work identity, values and ethics, diversity, human rights, social and economic justice, and cultural competence with emphasis on Hispanic families and children.

  • Identify and critique a variety of theories, methods and techniques specific to generalist social work practice with emphasis on organizations and communities.
  • Integrate social work values into issues related to race/ethnicity, class, gender and sexual orientation in work with diverse and vulnerable populations.
  • Apply concepts and principles of generalist practice with organizations and communities within a global context.
  • Demonstrate cultural competence in generalist practice with an emphasis on Latino/Hispanic populations.
  • Be able to identify and refer clients to services for substance use and recovery using Screening, Brief Intervention, and Referral to Treatment (SBIRT) techniques.

Learn More About Helping Others

In SOWK 6325, you will improve your ability to engage, assess and intervene in organizations and communities. To learn more about this course or any other course in the online Master of Social Work from Our Lady of the Lake University, call 855-275-1082 to speak with an admissions advisor right away, or you can request more information.

The content presented on this page is representative information for example purposes and is subject to change as course and student needs change over time.

Programs that include this course