Overcoming Obstacles to Forming Empowerment Groups: A Consumer Advisory Board for Homeless Clients

The term "empowerment" is currently in vogue in social work, indicating a renewed interest in practice approaches that seek to increase client control over the social and organizational environment. Although the term may be relatively new, the goal of client empowerment is steeped in the social work tradition, particularly in the origins of social group work. Toseland and Rivas (1984) contrasted the diagnosis and treatment focus of the Charity Organization Societies with the focus of the settlement houses, which "offered groups as an opportunity for citizens to join together to share their views, to gain mutual support, and to exercise the power derived from their association for social change" (p. 40). Group work, as practiced by the settlement house workers, emphasized the use of groups to promote education, peer group association, and community change. In the 1930s, 1940s, and 1950s, as group work became influenced by the professionalization movement in social work, interest gradually shifted to more remedial and psychotherapeutic group approaches (Brown, 1991; Toseland & Rivas, 1984). As group services began to be offered in more clinically oriented settings, the influence of psychoanalytic theory on group practice became stronger. Increasingly, group work was focused on diagnosis and treatment more than on education, socialization, and social change (Alissi, 1980). The pendulum swung back again during the turbulent decade of the 1960s, when social work rediscovered its historic link to social reform (Fisher, 1987). Group work educators such as Papell and Rothman (1966) and Wiener (1964) articulated and refined the social goals model of group work that emphasized participatory democracy, cultural diversity, and social change. The 1960s also saw the emergence of the social action model of community organization practice. Although it differed in methodology and the size of the target systems, community organization's social action model and group work's social goals model both emphasized the redistribution of power to disenfranchised community or group members. Since the 1960s, the social change perspective in social work has largely been overshadowed by remedial approaches emphasizing pathology and individual change. Whereas the mutual aid focus of group work's reciprocal model (Gitterman & Shulman, 1986; Schwartz, 1961) represents a departure from this trend, its primary emphasis is on interpersonal growth rather than social change. Practitioners working with oppressed client groups have recently begun to develop empowerment-oriented practice approaches that emphasize the shifting of power and resources to consumers of services (Breton, 1988; Cohen, 1989; Cox, 1988; Parsons, 1988; Solomon, 1985). The groups described by these authors represent creative extensions of the reciprocal model in which increased power and control, along with mutual aid, are primary goals. The empowerment intervention strategies used by these groups were described by Cox (1988) as those methodological approaches which mobilize consumers of services, their families and communities toward (a) self-care and (b) authentic involvement in the creation of a better environment. The transfer to clients of knowledge and skills necessary for accomplishing these tasks through the use of group work strategies is an essential component of such interventions. (p. 112) Cox (1988) stressed the importance of the "personal as political" and viewed the focus of group activity as covering a continuum from private issues to public troubles (Schwartz, 1974). From this perspective, a social action group can enhance the physical and mental health of individual participants, and a group focused on self-care can evolve into a potent force for social change (Cohen, 1988; Cox & Longres, 1981). The literature reflects a growing interest in empowerment-oriented groups for homeless clients (Berman-Rossi & Cohen, 1988; Breton, 1988; Glasser & Suroviak, 1988; Lee, 1986). …