Citizenship and participation: concepts and realities in Community Social Work

Abstract

Community Social Work at the local level should address contemporary challenges from a logic that allows helping create and build social citizenship, from the promotion of social rights, justice, equality and encouraging the participation of all concerned. Through this article we intend to publicize community problems relating to the organization of social policies at local level, information obtained from a semi- structured interview with social workers in this field, and in-depth interviews conducted with policy makers in the areas of Social Welfare municipalities of the Community of Madrid with over one hundred thousand inhabitants, whose treatment was performed using the technique of thematic analysis by the ATLAS-ti software., regarding the importance of citizenship and participation. We want to underline the important contribution of Community Social Work in building new models of active and inclusive citizenship, social policies that legitimize and give effect to human rights, and contribute to increased social welfare of citizens, participation of citizens being one of its basic pillars.