Roles In Social Work

For me personally, the visit gave me a much better and boarder idea about the roles that social workers play. Having spent 5 months as an intern at Boys’ Town Singapore, a residential home, my idea of a social worker is someone who plays “parent” to his or her client. At Boys’ Town, the social workers indeed does help to play the role of a parent to the boys’ under their charge. They are also the boys’ link to the outside world, helping to make appointments with the judicial courts, conveying any needs or messages that the boys might have or any issues that they face in the home to their parents, and so on.

Hearing the experiences of social workers in the different settings during the Social Work Freshmen Orientation Camp did not help to

There, social workers really have to be a jack-of-all-trades. From helping to direct distressed parents to the nearest childcare center is to facilitating support groups, the social workers do it all. Being the focal point for community need, FSCs handle cases such as families with low income and cases where mild to moderate violence is involved. As such, social workers operating in FSCs are required to have a myriad of knowledge and skills. They need to know where to refer cases or clients that the FSC is unable to take up to, and they also need to possess soft skills such as counseling and mediation, which would probably come from their social work training. To me, the arsenal that a social worker needs to have is not exhaustible, as they are constantly faced with new cases and challenges that would require them to adapt and pick up new skills or knowledge. The biggest takeaway I had from this visit was how the goal of an FSC seems to be to return the community back to the “kampong era”. Back in those days, there was hardly a need for social intervention as neighbours were often able to seek help and rely on the skillsets of one another. In other words, “community assets” were well utilised. I feel that indeed, resources are in the neighbourhood, thus if Singaporeans are able to lose the “closed-door policy” of living, that has become pretty synonymous with living in Housing Development Board (HDB) flats in Singapore, and start relying on one another instead of governmental or formal organisations, the community would be able to become a much better place and the need for external social intervention would be