Toward a Mission-Based Model for Social Word: A Foundation for Practice

Abstract

In response to calls for evidence-based and other practices conceptualizing social work as a scientifically validated intervention to achieve certain ends, this paper proposes that the profession needs to recall the legacy of the settlement movement. In this tradition, a mission of social integration of marginalized persons defined social work. Settlement workers utilized socialization and re-socialization of target populations, and their efforts combined individual, group, and community practices. The vocabulary of the time called this: social casework, social group work, and community organization. This profound sense of mission separates settlement work from today's scientifically validated modalities. This paper calls for revitalizing this sense of mission, embodied in an earlier era by the pioneers of social work, in professional practice to-day.

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