Community Service And Youth Workers: A Focus On Indigenous Communities

Community Service and Indigenous Communities

Discuss about the Community Based Programs for Poor Economic Stabilities.
 

Community service can be defined as the work that is done by a certain group of professionals that mainly help in benefitting others. Usually in most of the cases, community service does not make an individual earn money but sometimes such professionals can get food as well as small gifts from the persons who are benefitted from them (Gwyne et al., 2016). Community services can help any cohort of population who are in need like that of the children as well as senior citizens, people who are suffering from disabilities as well as English language learners, immigrants and many others. In most of the cases, community services are mainly seen to be organized through a local group that may take place at the place of worship, school as well as nonprofit organizations (Green et al., 2016). By providing effective community services, one might get the opportunity to help others and at the same time may gain different types of skills that include construction, teaching, medication skills, healthcare activities as well as customer services. Sometimes working in a community service may help the individuals to learn about different aspects of the careers that they want to pursue in the future. It also includes a huge number of opportunities for personal benefits that include helping to be more organized, compassionate as well as responsible (Lloyd et al., 2015). Therefore, this assignment will first describe one such community health service that is serving the indigenous people of the nation of Australian. Following these important skills required for being a community youth workers, values and skills helping to support culturally diverse people, different types of ethical dilemmas faced and importance of codes of ethics would be discussed. 

Indigenous families are seen to be highly affected by different ranges of complex issues that have high impact on the health as well as well-being of the people of the native background. As they mainly reside in the rural and remote areas of the nation, they often have to face a number of challenges mainly due to the reason of being physically isolated from the different types of important service centers (Munns & Walker, 2015). Small population mainly characterizes such communities, less developed market, poor economic stabilities, lack of proper infrastructure for better living as well as improper access to the healthcare services of the urban areas. They have to be largely dependent on the government-funded programs. However, most of them fear to get access to such services mainly due to the clashes with their traditional culture and that of the western culture. Therefore, they are seen to go through very struggle some lives with huge number of chronic ailments due to improper lifestyle management, different types of addictions, economic instability as well as other mental and physical disabilities. It becomes the duty of the community centers to develop services helping to serve aboriginal communities (Panaretto et al., 2014). Bungree Aboriginal Association is also one of the most important community services located in the Central coast and is mainly seen to provide a variety of wide range of services to help the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people who live in the Central Coast of New South Wales. It is one of the registered not for profit organizations which are active from the time of 7th July 1995. They are seen to provide services to children, elderly people, and families as well as disabled and disadvantaged people for more than two decades in the nation. They have the goal that all the native people living in the community should have access to the provision of the effective as well as high quality services. They have the aim to embrace the culture by ensuring commitment to the continuous improvement through innovative programs as well as excellence in service delivery. They are seen to have a wide number of programs as well as services like respite care program, community options program, aboriginal housing program, community transport program, intensive family based services, podiatry programs, specialist homelessness services, social support services and community aged care packages. They have approximately 35 members in the present and encouraged more young individuals to join them in this purpose for serving for the greater good of people. 

Skills Required for Community Youth Workers

Community development work mainly helps in engaging communities in understanding the issues that are affecting their lives and thereby setting goals for them for their improvement. They are therefore seen to respond to the problems as well as needs through empowerment as well as active participation. Therefore, the role of youth community workers is to ensure proper identification of the community skills, assets, issues as well as their needs, monitoring that people are having their say and developing new forms of resources that are in dialogue with the community and at the same time evaluate the present existing programs (Townsend et al., 2015). They are also seen to build links with other groups and agencies, helping to raise public awareness on different issues that are relevant to the community and thereby preparing reports and policies. They are also responsible for managing funds, developing and implementing strategies and liaising with interested groups and individuals to set up new services. Moreover, planning, attending and coordinating meetings and events, encouraging participation in different types of activities, challenging inappropriate behavior are also one of the other roles of youth workers (reeve  et al., 2015). They also need to have knowledge and skills about important aspects associated with community care service. They should have advocacy as well as networking skills, excellent communication, interpersonal and team building skills. They should have also good listening skills. They should have knowledge about the research as well as report writing along with the ability for interpreting or presenting data. They should have non-judgmental as well as positive attitude along with the creative thinking and problem solving abilities (Durey et al., 2016). They should have political, social as well as negotiating skills. They should also have a proper knowledge about how the public sector bodies work. They should develop compassion as well as the ability for empathizing with the life experiences of people. They should have knowledge and skills about fundraising at the management level helping to successfully provide services without any interruption.   

One of the most important skills required for handling culturally diverse patients is cultural awareness and cultural knowledge.  This can be explained with the help of an example. In case of the aboriginals, the community professional should know about their cultural traditions, preferences and inhibitions. They should know the history of the community and thereby try to understand the different cultural aspects that he needs to maintain to provide culturally competent care (Irving et al., 2017). They aboriginals do not like direct questioning and consider these as a rude approach while interacting for the first time. Therefore while providing service, if the professionals directly ask them any personal questions they may feel disrespected and disappointed. Therefore, this type of cultural awareness is very important for the community workers. Another important skill that is also important is culturally competent communication. Culturally competent communication mainly means that the professionals should develop communication techniques that align with the communication norms that are followed by the aboriginal people. This can be explained with the help of an example here. The aboriginal people do not prefer eye contact and therefore, if the community workers interact with the client community with eye contact, the clients may feel disrespected by them. Therefore, the non-verbal mode of communication skills should be such that it would help to ensure that they are maintaining cultural norms and not disrespecting clients 9Yi et al., 2015). Another very important attribute that need to be overcome by the professionals is cultural biasness.  In many cases, it is seen that the community workers may sometime have cultural biasness but cannot understand such aspect, as they cannot release the presence of such attribute within them. In such a situation, the professionals even do not understand that they are providing service, which are culturally incompetent. Such biasness mainly is reflected in the attitudes and behaviors of the professionals making them unacceptable to the community they are serving. Therefore, they should be culturally unbiased and should consider all members of the community as human beings who require their service for better living rather than discriminating on caste, creed, class, religions and others (Brussoni et al., 2015). Cultural sensitivity is yet another skill where professionals should be aware that cultural similarities as well as differences exist between people and therefore no additional values should be provided to the concept that may be either negative, positive, worse, better, wring as well as right.

Cultural Competence and Importance for Culturally Diverse People

The Australian community worker Association had published the ethical codes of practice that every community workers need to follow while providing service to the clients. The first principle states that every professional should maintain the rights of every clients considering them only as human beings irrespective of their castes, race, gender, religion, age as well as sexual and gender diversity (Johnston et al., 2016). They should also ensure social inclusion where each of the community members should have equal rights for participation in the society helping them to get scopes of dull social, educational as well as economic participation (Acwa.org.au, 2018). They have the responsibility to ensure that every societies are providing equitable resources and respect. The community workers have the responsibility of protecting the community clients against any form of discrimination based on age, sex, race as well as disability. They should recognize the first people of Australia and thereby respect their rights to self-determination (Chenoweth et al., 2015). Following these, the community workers should ensure that they are not discriminating the people based on their races, education, socio economic standards and lifestyle management issues. They should provide respect to the cultural requirements of the clients and ensure that they are trying their best to fulfill their wishes and requirements thereby maintaining their autonomy and dignity (Lee et al., 2016). They should be placed in the centre for any sort of decision-making regarding any services so that the community feels empowered. The community workers should ensure that the Aboriginals feel socially included in the society helping them to live better quality lives (Kildea et al., 2016). 

Often while providing services to clients, many situations may arise where the professionals may suffer from ethical dilemma. These are situations where the professional has to make a choice between the two options neither of which would help in resolving the situation in an ethically acceptable manner. This can be made to understand with different examples. There may be situation where the community worker realizes that one of the cultural traditions of the community client is to drink alcohol and smoke tobacco as a part of their cultural norms. However, as a community worker he should prevent the client from undertaking such practices (Stepehens et al., 2014). There arises an ethical dilemma as the professional cannot interrupt cultural practices as it is assignment the ethical codes of ethics and at the same time the professionals should take steps to ensure the safety and best quality life of the clients. Here the professional may suffer from ethical dilemma and take decisions that would help to meet the objective without hurting the dignity and autonomy of the patients. In this ways, different types of ethical dilemma may interrupt normal flow of providing service to the clients. In such situations, it becomes extremely important for the community youth worker to critically analyze the situations; develop problems solving skills and decision-making skills. These skills would help the professionals to take interventions by which they can assure best health of the clients at the same time by ensuring that their autonomy and dignity are maintained the ethical principle of justice s ensured.

Ethical Codes of Practice for Community Workers

Conclusion:

From the entire discussion, it becomes clear that the community service workers have responsibility to ensure that all the members of the community are not only living in their best health but are also having proper access to resources required to live a quality life. Therefore, it is important for them to develop skills that help them to provide the best service to the community workers. The Aboriginal communities are one of the disadvantaged communities who do not have proper access to different services in the nation and dace inequality in comparison to the non-natives. Therefore, it becomes excessively important for the professionals to follow the codes of ethics and overcome different ethical dilemma to make sure that they are getting culturally competent service that are respectful to their needs and requirements. 

References:

Acwa.org.au. (2018). Code of ethics and Practice guidelines - Australian Community Workers Association | ACWA. [online] Available at: https://www.acwa.org.au/resources/ethics-and-standards [Accessed 7 Jun. 2018].

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