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Beginning Social Work Concepts

Social  work  is  a profession primarily concerned with helping vulnerable people and communities work through challenges and difficulties they face in everyday life. There are, of course, a wide variety of challenges that individuals and communities face and in turn there are many roles that a social worker may play, from directly counseling individuals , advocating for their needs, or referring people to other resources.

As a trusted community partner, libraries welcome community members from a variety of backgrounds and with a variety of needs. In fact, there are times when patrons are in crisis and need immediate assistance. Sometimes those needs may require specialized resources or connections to services or experts in the community, other times, it may require the understanding of a patron’s psycho-social needs to determine the most appropriate response.

Libraries have begun to adopt a range of social work concepts, dependent upon their community needs and their organizational capacity. For some that means developing relationships with area service providers and inviting them into the library, for others it means training staff on applying social work concepts, and for others, it may mean hiring a social worker. 

Here are a articles from others that can help those new to social work concepts in the library get better oriented:

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