Empowering the Marginalized Through Community Work: A Literature Review

Abstract

Community work is one of the methods of practice that is at the heart of the social work profession. It entails working with communities that have been marginalized. The goal of community work is usually to have communities improve their wellbeing. Without empowerment, marginalized communities remain powerless over circumstances that prevail in their environments.
 The main object of this article is to review literature on steps that may be taken to empower communities. In writing this article, we adopted a traditional style of literature review where we obtained our data from the following databases: Springer Link, Wiley Online Library and ProQuest central. We used the following key words to retrieve articles from the online databases: power, community, empowerment and community empowerment. We paired each of the key words using the Boolean operator AND. We observed from the literature that there are three levels of empowerment; psychological, organizational and community levels of empowerment. We also identified three models of that are suitable for use in community work for the purpose of empowering marginalized communities. 
 From the model developed by Jackson et al. (1989), we concluded that steps that may be taken in empowering the marginalized through community work are; developmental casework, mutual support, issue identification and campaign, community participation and social movements.