An Analysis of Goals and Roles in Community Organization Practice.

This paper examines the traditional literature in community organization and attempts to reformulate certain ideas in a way that achieves greater clarity and utility for practice. The focus is on goals in community organization practice, varying roles of the practitioner related to these, and the relationship of these two variables to certain aspects of decision making. To have validity community organization practice must be geared to the attainment of some social welfare goal or to the solution of some social welfare problem. It entails the completion of a concrete task or the solution of a delimited problem having to do with the functioning of the community social system. It is important to note that these delimited goals are always directed toward achieving some common good, never to the attainment of personal profit or gain as a prime motive or objective. In drawing up criteria for defining the welfare field as a social institution in the society indicates that there must be "absence of profit motive as a dominant program purpose."