Caseworker

In social work, a caseworker is not a social worker but is employed by a government agency, nonprofit organization, or another group to take on the cases of individuals and provide them with advocacy, information and solutions. Also, in political arenas, caseworkers are employed as a type of legislative staffer by legislators to provide service to their constituents such as dealing with individual or family concerns. A social worker who works as a caseworker obtains social casework education and training naturally through their compulsory degree works. In social work, casework means to engage a client in learning their situation, to build a suitable plan of action, and helping the client to solve their problems through client commitment and use of their own and community resources, the coordinated service is called case management. British MPs and members of the United States Congress often provide constituent services through caseworkers for better use of their allotted funds. The history of social casework is closely tied to the advent of social work as a general professional discipline. In the late nineteenth century, the formation of the Charity Organization Society, and the Settlement movement represented the beginning of efforts towards alleviating industrial poverty. While social casework was a primary method of intervention, it was not until Mary Richmond published Social Diagnosis in 1917 that a formal definition for social casework began to formulate. In Social Diagnosis, Richmond advocated for working with clients, rather than on them, and for gaining "sympathetic understanding of the old world backgrounds from which the client came" in lieu of making generalizations or assumptions. The term social diagnosis came to refer to "a systematic way for helping professionals to gather information and study client problems" based on each client's unique background, problems, and individualized needs. Social casework is the method employed by social workers to help individuals find solutions to problems of social adjustment that are difficult for individuals to navigate on their own.