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Advocacy in action
Direct social work takes always the side of the powerless. It enhances the power of the people and takes care that they are heard. It does not do the work instead of the people but with the. It empowers them to take control of their lives. Direct social work rejects the role of an intermediary and the task that are prescribed by the system of exclusion, marginalisation and disablement. Advocacy instead.
Testimony on suffering
Direct social work intercepts the stories that would otherwise be unheard. It gives legitimacy to human distress and takes it as a platform for further action. Social work does not leave people alone. In the stories about peoples suffering it tries to find the sources of power and helps to create new life stories. Priorities of direct social work are: witnessing social, economic and personal distress, direct linking of people for action and organising the response to distress.
Ethics of action
Witnessing, which is an important function of social work anyway, gets an activist charge of the movement. Things need to be changed. Social work goes from being a silent witness of human misery onto becoming an amplifier of the voice of the oppressed. Talking to people should not be an end in itself; it has to become a starting point of direct action. Direct social work supports and develops talking and deciding that enhance power of common action.
Community ethics
Direct social work enters communities, to be close to the people in their environment. Personal distress is social. Human distress is not matter of an individual but it is seen as a reflection of the social situation of the person. Social work is bound to the ethics of connecting people, groups, themes and different levels of existence; it is not limited to material, experiential, legal or social dimension of the issue.
Direct responsibility.
Social worker is in the first place responsible to a person and not subjected to the rules of the system. Social work is operating on the basis of users mandate. Mandate, mission and responsibility are given by people themselves and not by state, charity or even capital. Social work must not concede to imposed value systems and notions of the human nature, it has to stem from people, their social reality and their dreams.
Knowledge
Social worker never ceases to learn. To learn from people and to give own knowledge to common use in construction of solutions. He or she learns from experience and from experts of experience. Theory is a tool or a weapon re-created by the use. Social work needs knowledge of doing (praxis) and not knowledge of ruling. Direct social work uses the knowledge of people, hidden, secret and ignored knowledge to subvert dominant notions which oppress peoples desires.
Autonomy
Direct social work does not use the rules as an excuse and apology for unethical action basic guide in doing is ethics. It accepts only those formal deeds that empower people; it does not restrict its action by the rules. It declines to be exploited to mend mistake of the others and to be a prolongation of repressive organs and institutions. It resists also bagatelisation and exploitation of voluntary work for austerity and social cuts, for the reasons of creating income and substitution of the professional work with cheap and dubious work of others. It resists expropriation of people who work socially for their own good and expropriation of social work as such.
User perspective
Social worker must derive his work from users perspective, from his concrete life situation and attitude to it. Solutions cannot be given in advance and just offered to choose, the have to arise from common work. Only in this way human dignity will be preserved. Social work has to enable and empower good practices of survival, human perseverance and courage. It has to unearth forgotten, hidden sources of power, strengthen tem and add to their value and legitimacy. It respects the heroic stance of the people that confront the distress and reminds them that they are capable of doing it and that they can overcome.