Community Resilience through Green Social Work Practice

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Background and Purpose:
Green Social Work highlights the ways social, environmental, and spatial conditions shape vulnerability, resilience, and unequal exposure to harm. However, socio-environmental interventions are still rarely conceptualized as structured community social work practices, particularly in contexts of collective trauma, displacement, and chronic insecurity. At the same time, community archaeology has developed participatory, place-based models that engage people in shared work with landscape, heritage, and material culture, yet these practices are seldom theorized within social work. This study addresses that gap by examining community archaeology as a form of Green Social Work. It asks: How does a community archaeological intervention function as a socio-environmental social work practice in contexts of mass trauma, and what does this reveal about community adaptation, resilience, and capacity building?

Methods:
We used an exploratory qualitative multiple case study design to examine two week-long programs at Tell Qana, an interdisciplinary community archaeology project intentionally structured as a green, community-based social work setting. Case 1 involved 15 twelfth-grade students from a Gaza-border kibbutz who survived the October 7 attack and were living in displacement and ongoing community reconstruction. Case 2 involved 8 reserve soldiers coping with PTSD, service-related physical injuries and psychosocial strain following extended reserve duty during the Iron Swords War. Data sources included prolonged participant observation, detailed fieldnotes produced by a community social work practitioner-researcher and a senior archaeologist, a teacher narrative incorporating student and parent reflections, and open-ended written reflections from reserve soldiers. Interpretive thematic analysis combined within-case and cross-case comparison, focusing on how regulation, participation, and connection emerged through interactions among routines, landscape, group processes, and material practices.

Results:
Across both cases, four interrelated mechanisms captured how community archaeology operated as Green Social Work in practice. First, structured collective routines functioned as regulatory scaffolding by creating temporal predictability through shared sequences of travel, excavation, meals, laboratory work, rest, and closing circles. Second, repetitive and focused material tasks, including brushing soil, sieving sediment, and washing and sorting sherds, served as embodied anchors that supported concentration and manageable participation. Third, the outdoor landscape functioned as a holding environment by offering openness, movement, and distance from sites of trauma while allowing distress to surface without overwhelming the group. Fourth, shared engagement with archaeological materials produced tangible outcomes that fostered competence, contribution, continuity, and collective purpose. Together, these dynamics informed the concept of relational ecological regulation: adaptive capacity emerging through the interaction of environmental setting, collective structure, and material participation.

Conclusions and Implications:
Findings position community archaeology not as a backdrop to social work, but as a distinct Green Social Work practice that links environment, heritage, and collective action. This framing advances environmental and climate justice scholarship by showing how heritage sites and outdoor collective practices can strengthen adaptive capacity among communities living with displacement, structural violence, and ongoing conflict. For social work, the study offers a transferable model for designing trauma-informed, outdoor, task-focused, community interventions in which landscape and material culture are treated as active components of practice rather than passive settings