Human Services And The Afrocentric Paradigm

Discover how human services professionals can help to eliminate cultural oppression! Human Services and the Afrocentric Paradigm presents a new way of understanding human behavior, attacking social problems, and exploring social issues. This excellent guide shows that understanding the simultaneous forces of oppression and spiritual alienation in American society serves as a foundation for understanding the societal problems here. The first book to offer a comprehensive exposition of how the Afrocentric paradigm can be used by human service professionals and community advocates, Human Services and the Afrocentric Paradigm discusses why and how human service work is hampered by Eurocentric cultural values and will help you to offer fair and effective services to your clients. Human Services and the Afrocentric Paradigm provides you with a concrete discription of how the Afrocentric model can be applied in human services to help people of all races and ethnicities. You will expand and diversify your knowledge base in human services by understanding the cultural values, traditions, and experiences of people of African ancestry. Some of the issues and concepts in the Afrocentric paradigm that you will explore are: defining the Afrocentric worldview, complete with a discussion of its philosophical assumptions and its shortcomings understanding traditional helping assumptions and methods of West African societies and how these have influenced the helping strategies of African-Americans exploring the strengths and weaknesses of some early African-American human service scholars, with special concern placed on their rejection of traditional African methods in favor of Eurocentric ideas resolving youth violence and helping people with substance abuse problems examining Afrocentric assumptions about resource distribution, morality, and societal relationships identifying organizational and conceptual differences in Eurocentric and Afrocentric paradigms creating organizational empowerment and an enhanced work environment via the Afrocentric paradigm Human Services and the Afrocentric Paradigm will help you understand, solve, and prevent problems that are confronted by several races, especially individuals of African descent. This timely and relevant worldview is thoroughly explained to assist you in better serving people of color. The Afrocentric paradigm will help human services practitioners, administrators, policy advocates, analysts, educators, and black studies professors and students achieve educational and treatment objectives by showing you the importance of various cultural values and how to integrate them to make a difference!

This edited collection focuses on Africentric social work practice, providing invaluable assistance to undergraduate students in developing foundational skills and knowledge to further their understanding of how to initiate and maintain best practices with African Canadians. In social work education and field practice, students will benefit from the depth and breadth of this book’s discussions of social, health and educational concerns related to Black people across Canada. The book’s contributors present a broad spectrum of personal and professional experiences as African Canadian social work practitioners, students and educators. They address issues that African Canadians confront daily, which social work educators and potential practitioners need to understand to provide racially and culturally relevant services. The book presents students with an invaluable opportunity to develop their practical skills through case studies and critical thinking exercises, with recommendations for how to ethically and culturally engage in African-centred service provision.

This edited collection focuses on Africentric social work practice, providing invaluable assistance to undergraduate students in developing foundational skills and knowledge to further their understanding of how to initiate and maintain best practices with African Canadians. In social work education and field practice, students will benefit from the depth and breadth of this book's discussions of social, health, and educational concerns related to Black people across Canada. The book's contributors present a broad spectrum of personal and professional experiences as African Canadian social work practitioners, students and educators. They address issues that African Canadians confront daily, which social work educators and potential practitioners need to understand to provide racially and culturally relevant services. The book presents students with an invaluable opportunity to develop their practical skills through case studies and critical thinking exercises, with recommendations for how to ethically and culturally engage in African-centred service provision. In addition, scholars with an interest in Africentric social work practice and research will find this text useful to help support their commitment to advancing racially and culturally relevant learning and teaching.

In the black helping tradition, spirituality is the sense of the sacred and divine. It is a critical value deeply rooted in the African worldview and used by African Americans as a tool for survival. Provocative and well-written, this is the first book to draw a relationship between social work, spirituality, and the helping tradition among African Americans. Offering a wealth of historical detail and narrative, Elmer and Joanne Martin explore spirituality as a foundation for understanding people of African descent and as a skill to evoke self-help. This ground-breaking book raises compelling questions about the limitations and strengths of mainstream social work in issues of black spirituality and its role in strengthening the black community today.

Within the context of the nation's changing demographic and cultural landscape, this one of a kind book brings together a national roster of leading practitioners and scholars who recommend innovative strategies for reducing racial and ethnic disparities that are pervasive across all fields of practice in the health and human services.

On human services