Rethinking Social Work Practice with Multicultural Communities

With research showing that clients from diverse racial and ethnic groups disproportionately experience barriers in their interactions with social services and that providers recognize the need to be better prepared to work with these groups, this book invites us to rethink current approaches to social work practice with multicultural communities.

We begin with a synthesis of the current evidence on the provision of care to multicultural communities that provides an in-depth look at both client and provider experiences. The following chapters offer tangible, research-based approaches to engaging with multicultural clients and reveal often unrecognized problems with current models of social work practice. A unique compilation of rigorous qualitative, experimental, and community-based studies demonstrate the effectiveness of culturally grounded interventions and identify the specific factors associated with positive outcomes. Areas covered include disability, marriage and couple relationship problems, domestic violence, and mental illness within Latinx, African American, First Nations, and South Asian communities. As the authors in this book show, the stories of multicultural communities are narratives of unprecedented resourcefulness and reinvention. Yet, social work underutilizes rich family and community cultural resources. By not facilitating their involvement, social service systems compromise these vital resources which social services cannot replace.

In arguing that we need to expand professional boundaries to encompass indigenous practices, family and extended kin, and therapeutic relationships that make sense to different cultural groups, this book will be of interest to those studying the ways in which social work practice can be improved to better suit the needs of a racially and ethnically diverse population.

This book was originally published as a special issue of the Journal of Ethnic & Cultural Diversity in Social Work.

Yolanda C. Padilla is Director of the Center for Diversity and Social & Economic Justice, Council on Social Work Education, and the Clara Pope Willoughby Centennial Professor in Child Welfare in the Steve Hicks School of Social Work at the University of Texas at Austin, USA.

Ruth McRoy is the Donahue and DiFelice Endowed Professor and a co-founding director of the Research and Innovations in Social, Economic, and Environmental Equity (RISE) in the School of Social Work at Boston College, Massachusetts, USA.

Rocío Calvo is Associate Professor and founding Director of the Latinx Leadership Initiative in the School of Social Work at Boston College, Massachusetts, USA.