From Amelioration to Transformation in Human Services : Towards critical practice

What should be the core function of comunity-based human service organizations? Is it to care for people who are currently hurting, or should they be addressing the systemic and structural social ills that lead to problems in the first place? Can we expect human service organizations do both? There is an increasing need to transform the role of human services in communities. Treating people one person at a time through ameliorative services largely ignores the social determinants of well-being and does nothing to affect the root causes of people's problems. This is the story of one youth-serving human service organization that realized it was time to try a different approach. After thirty-five years of pouring their energy into the community to try and help young people and their families, they realized that the problems were getting worse. They weren't making much of a difference. This work chronicles their organizational change journey from amelioration to transformation.