From Caretaking to Community Building

Since my retirement from CLASS in early 2019, I have been spending time coaching and sharing ideas with other human service agencies in their quest to assist the folks they serve to become more relevant in the community. Some of these agencies serve folks with disabilities and the reality they experience is that their staff have become more caretakers with the folks they serve. For many people they serve, staff need to help folks with personal care, meal preparation, doing the things they need to do to get through the day. This is a heavy load and once all these personal things have been tended to, there is hardly time available to fully engage in community. And in the process, the people they serve continue to stay separated from the community. In these scenarios, isolation prevails.

As I have talked with agency leaders about this challenge, it has pushed us to consider another track. If people want to be active in community, this support is different from what we offer in caretaking. Certainly personal care is essential, and we need to tend to this, but in community building, the skill set essential to community inclusion requires a different approach. Here we need to understand culture and community, how to map and reveal the places and spaces of connection, and how social capital (relationships) develop and sustain. These skills are different from the important caretaking actions.

And so, if you are caught in this dilemma lets talk more about how you can bifurcate these actions with staff and find the ways and means to more meaningful community engagement for the folks you serve. The macro skills of community mapping, understanding the social infrastructure, utilizing social capital and other community strategies are available. The key is to keep them clear.