engleski

Contributing to social development through community work approach

During the last two decades social work in Croatia was very preoccupied with remediation of the consequences of war as well as with the restoration of modern social services. In this process social work professionals did not pay enough attention to community work approach but were mostly oriented to social casework and social work with groups in the frame of so called psychosocial paradigm. The work with communities remained rather neglected. This fact was the reason for introducing of a new project in Croatian social work practice and education. Three partners (HAN University, Netherlands, University of Zagreb, Croatia and Center for Civil Initiatives, Croatia) joined and launched project with the overall objective to improve the quality of life in communities and increase citizens participation and equal leadership of men and women through education in community development for students and professionals in social work. The project goal was to stimulate community empowerment and citizen's participation in Croatia by building up professional capacity for community development work. This goal has three components: A) To improve the education in gender-sensitive community development work in the Social Work Study Centre of the University of Zagreb, through the development of a curriculum community development work for MA studies and extending the curriculum for students at BA level with new theory and methodologies. B) To provide further education in community development work to professional social workers and the development of a summer school to provide this education also in the future. C) To develop a new practice in community development work in pilot projects, in two Croatian cities - Karlovac and Petrinja, and through this provide practice experience for students and professionals. The project is funded by Dutch government in the frame of MATRA program and the project results will be presented for the first two years of the project.

community work ; quality of life ; citizens participation ; education

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