From Pavement to Piazza: Grassroots Social Work to Counteract the Globalization of Marginality
Author(s)
Ferraro, Ermete
Abstract
This paper emphasizes that “consciousness-raising” and “community development” can be useful processes to stimulate responsible social participation on the part of the most marginal individuals and groups. To overcome a bureaucratic and pietistic model of the welfare state which serves in the long run to increase their dependence and socio-cultural subordination, there is a need for alternative social policies, capable of improving people’s empowerment and social citizenship. Giving more resources and decision-making power to the most marginal could amount to changing an unfair and oppressive society from the roots up. This paper takes issue with current neo-liberal trends by returning to a territory-based and resident-focused image of social work. This way, non-profit agencies can play a more active and stimulating role in support of communitarian networks and help avoid the risk of the Third Sector’s alternative spur being compromised by the otherwise “commodification” of welfare. Only in this way might one stop the transformation of non-profit organizations into mere private providers for a buyer/controller state, more business-minded than really concerned with freeing the poor and the marginal “underclass” from subordination and exclusion.
