Strengths Perspective in Critical Macro Practice: Tentative Guidance for Transformative Strengths-Based Policy, Organizational, and Community Practice

This chapter aims to expand both theorizing and application of strengths perspec- tive in policy, organizational, and community contexts across inter-professional settings in human services. It begins with a brief overview of the history of strengths perspective and its pivotal influence on social work, human services, community psychology, community development, and other disciples. It goes on to bring to light traditionally dominant policy, organization, and community practice foundations within interdisciplinary human service practice. By highlighting these historically situated and presently reinforced rational, bureaucratic, and linear approaches; it argues for intentional integration of strengths perspective into macro practice en- vironments. Aligned with early scholars and practitioners that use critical perspec- tives as a foundation for the development of strengths perspective, and who assert its practical efficacy in numerous direct practice settings, it affirms broadening strengths perspective to policy, organizational, and community settings. In the interest of clarity, throughout the chapter, we use the term macro practice to describe human service activities within policy, organizational, and community set- tings (Reisch, 2017). Additionally, following the lead of other scholars in establishing critical community practice (Butcher, Banks, Henderson, & Robertson, 2007; Evans, 2015), many terms we conceive, such as critical strengths-based practice, critical macro practice, critical policy practice, and critical organizational practice. These terms, defined in further sections, differentiate these approaches from their more traditional, rational, and incremental counterparts. Beginning with a brief historical overview of strengths perspective, authors define critical strengths perspective, detail essential elements of critical macro practice, and provide examples of these distinct approaches in practice. The piece offers a critical lens to frame strengths perspective in macro contexts and demonstrates ways in which it can be applied in multiple policies, community, and organizational settings. Concluding with a set of tentative guides and considerations for critical strengths-based practice, such as prefigurative practices, humanization, intersec- tionality, democratic practice, and critical consciousness; we hope it offers tools, opens dialogue among practitioners and scholars, encourages active scholarship in this area, and spurs the necessary flourishing of truly transformative critical strengths-based practice