Community-based program design

The models that can be used for it are: Community practice in social work is linked with the historical roots of the profession's beginning in the United States.

More specifically, the history of community-based social work has evolved from the Charity Organization Society (COS) and the settlement house movements.

The poor conditions of mental health institutions and an increasing amount of research that illustrated the benefits of maintaining the relationships of the individuals served within the community surfaced to further the growth of community-based programs.

Although social work has been historically defined by these institutionalized and deinstitutionalized periods, informal community design programs have always existed.

'[3]Benefits of community-based program design include gaining insight into the social context of an issue or problem, mutual learning experiences between consumer and provider, broadening understanding of professional roles and responsibilities within the community, interaction with professionals from other disciplines, and opportunities for community-based participatory research projects.

The program sustainability is ensured by the identification of solutions to problems based on existing resources accessible to all community members.

[5] Some challenges of community-based program design are the limited availability of resources, propensity for high levels of staff turnover, the reliance upon unpaid volunteers, participant retention, and the evaluation of a dynamic task environment.

In the mid to late 20th century, anthropologists focusing on research program design discovered that excluding the desire, input, and commitment of local communities and people (for which problems were being attempted to be solved) would be unsuccessful and unsustainable without some type of community-based methodology.

[13] Additionally, there are examples, from the past 20 years, of social scientists like anthropologists utilizing collaborative strategies with the communities that they research and study to introduce ideas that can enact change at the individual level and even on a global scale.

In 1998, Farmer and his colleagues developed a community-based model of care in order to provide free and comprehensive HIV treatment in impoverished areas of Haiti.