Voluntary social welfare

Abstract

Those of us in the social welfare industry are concerned with the well being of people in our community - with standards of life and living, with people's access to quality care, with informal social supports, and with social relationships in general. Standards of life and levels of living are dependent on interventions and interactions of formal and informal kinds. Our formal and informal structures attempt to deliver three types of things - tangible resources, effective services, and close companionship. In very crude terms the first, tangible resources is provided, in a social welfare sense, by government; the second, effective services by government and non-government agencies; and the third close companionship, informally by family, friends, neighbours and grassroots support systems. Today I don't want to deal centrally with tangible resources or close companionship, but rather with the service system and how social workers might respond to it. Debates about the present and future operations of the welfare state revolve around arguments about the degree of state intervention and the public/private split. In the personal social services the division is threefold, or more appropriately two and a half fold. On the one hand some services are provided informally, by families and informal networks. On the other hand some are provided formally, by organised bureaucratic structures.