Spirituality - The Heart and Spirit of Social Work
WITH THE CURRENT GLOBAL INCREASE in population, the world is facing numerous challenges including climate change, poverty, social inequalities, refugees, human rights, and equal opportunities. Social workers, alongside other helping agencies, are working to address the variety of social issues affecting different communities and populations.
They aim to support and advocate for vulnerable and challenged communities such as families & children, older people, immigrants, the elderly and those engaged in the mental health and justice systems (Webb, 2023). They aim to ensure that these groups receive the support they need to improve their specific and general well-being needs. To deliver quality services, they actively address issues of advocacy, social justice, well-being and protection through systematic assessment and evaluation processes. Addressing these issues and processes allows for the identification of need and the provision of necessary services to meet need (Webb, 2023). The assessment and evaluation processes focus on breadth of well-being including the social, physical, spiritual, and emotional environments of those in need. One of the elements that guides service delivery is an understanding of the emotional well-being of each person, their positive experience of life and the deficits experienced, their strengths, resilience and personal fragilities. The practical deficits are often starkly clear but wholesome resolution of need will depend not only on practical resolutions but also on supporting meaningful hopes for the future, relationships that will help sustain life going forward and a trust and confidence in the vision for the future. That individual vision, purpose and meaning for life is a critical dimension in the process of personal development, improvement, healing and fulfilment. This dimension is variously referred to as strength of spirit, emotional well-being, sense of direction, and our inner spirit or drive for meaning in life. Spirituality gives purpose and strength to achieve plans that emerge from the joint assessment of need. (Martin, Myers, and Brickman, 2020).
* Full article available in printed copies.
Greg Gallagher
is a former Director and CEO Social Services and is member of the Board of the Scottish Catholic Safeguarding Standards Agency