A Community Resilience Informed Intervention Guideline for Integrated Service Delivery

Background and Purpose: With multiple decades of societies being plagued by environmental challenges impacting the livelihood and well-being of people, professions such as social work have made attempts to streamline service delivery, mostly through integrated frameworks and even software programs aimed at increasing efficiency. The call for alignment to global agendas for shared societal concerns implies another nuance to social service delivery. While social justice as a democratic ideal is embedded in social work theory and practice, it is proposed that the inclusion of the global agendas, like the Grand Challenges, could potentially paralyse the needed connection between practice and theory. This is likely if an understanding of networked intervention does not consider the current international context begging for the inclusion of indigenous knowledge in the development of resilient communities.

Methods: A large body of first-generation research- and practice knowledge exist on the four key aspects of sustainable development, social service delivery, indigenous knowledge and community resilience, within academic literature that is shaping the current international policy environment. To enable the development of a more manageable practice guide within an Implementation Research design, a systematic review was done on 631 related documents, coded through Atlas.ti to generate saturated themes. Within the thematic analyses of the coding, interpretive decisions were systematically documented to ensure transparency of the reflexive approach used.

Results: The study joins the four key aspects above into a third-generation knowledge product through the funnel steps in the Knowledge to Action framework. The results combine related but separate impactful concepts, from a deep exploration of academically published text since 2014. From the Atlas.ti generated quotations (28079) linked to the four concepts, 293 documents with the most quotations were sampled for coding. The larger number of codes were then reduced to themes which provided a scientific way of moulding existing knowledge into a guideline that enables more focused intervention for a social service delivery approach that recognises indigenously informed community resilience. The outcome of the study is an implementation guide based on a synthesis of the aforementioned key aspects.

Conclusions and Implications: The main outcome of the study answers the following questions influencing practice, policy, and further research:

• The elements needing to be considered for a community resilience approach to intervention.
• How relevant indigenous knowledge systems should be in community resilient intervention and what this entails?
• Which concepts from service delivery have relevance to networked intervention and how to optimise these for improvement?
• And within the context of social work, how do the grand challenges shape networked service delivery?

The study produced a more manageable, but conceptually rich tool, to support the Global Social Work Agenda. Through exposing the knowledge product to an international audience, further refinement through feedback is enabled.