Strategies Analysis – Street Angels Charity Documentary

Social Exclusion in Postmodern Society
Strategies Analysis – Street Angels Charity Documentary

Content

Introduction 3
Maximising Income and Securing Basic Resources 3
Strengthening Social Support and Network Integration 5
Partnership 5
Social Citizenship 6
Summary and conclusion 6
Reference 6

Introduction
Street Angels consortium, which the original aim was to keep more children off the street, was founded in 1988 and now aim to develop and maintain accessible educational, health-care, nutritional and recreational programs designed for children and their families, and increase public awareness about the plight of children forced to live and work on the streets of Brazil.

The efforts of the Street Angels consortium have been focused on Dona Aurora (a small community of Salvador, Brazil). When the project began working in this project, 2000 residents were living in crowed housing and lacked basic amenities. Street Angels has managed to provide security and opportunity for the children of this area and a wider sense of community and self-sufficiency for all those residents. With hard working, the project achieves some successes such as clean water, electricity, providing a construction of elementary school and so on.

This essay is going to introduce and analysis the strategies showed in the documentary which talking about this organization. The strategies are related to five topics: a) maximsing income and securing basic resources, b) strengthening social support and network integrations, c) participation, d) partnership and e) social citizenship. The later social worker and similarity project can benefit from the Street Angels consortium.

Maximising Income and Securing Basic Resources

Social exclusion as a dynamic process, one social problem can leads to more social problems and exclusions. The project was aim to keep as many children as possible off the streets of Salvador, but more families need to be helped than expected, so that the social workers have to “look for the ways inside the community, which basically means you have to help their moms and crease their incomes.” (It’s said in documentary.) ‘The poverty is at heat of social exclusion, which means any practitioner who wants to tackle social exclusion has to focus relentlessly maximsing incomes of those whom they work and extending that work to a whole area’ (Pierson, 2009, p42). Following with income creasing, resident’s basic life skill will get improved as well.

Many families of the community had no choice but to rely on the labour of their children. Without providing children’s destitute families with an alternate source of income, it would be hard to prevent children from being forced to beg or work in dangerous streets. Creasing income whether from benefit or personal job became key work of the Angels consortium. Under this concept, the education program came out and became the backbone of the organization. The project started from a couple of Canadian parent foster a kid here. And now foster parents commit monthly subsidy for five years to a specific child and family. The most of donation directly gave to the kid’s mom or responsible adult. And remaining funds are disbursed to emergency medical and housing aid to basis families.

Another one of the organization’s key fundraiser is that: young mothers and youth make ceramic angels that are shipped to Canada and sold to crease families’ incomes and fund.

There is a bank program that lends moms or families money to reduce the force of poverty. It’s an interesting self-helped program. Families qualifying for repairs are selected by lottery and divided into teams of three. Each lottery winner is allocated a part of repair grant and reciprocates their luck by providing 300 hours each of volunteer support services to the most vulnerable members of the community.

As the same time, those projects directly or indirectly helped to secure basic resources of residents. For example, the Back Program was supposed to the response to moms’ pleas for repairing homes. Lots of houses were health hazards and children sleep crowed together on dirt floors.

Strengthening Social Support and Network Integration

A social network is a web of relationships through which people are connected. An essential element of social work is “promoting the development of dependable social networks that fulfill certain functions for people”. Networks are crucial to families which want to overcome exclusion. (Pierson, 2009, p47)

Social worker’s professional network is a critical tool. The social workers of the organization used their own professional network to help the people here. Lots of projects were built under the support from the networks, such as the Street Angels School. The Street Angels School was set up with profits from both angels’ sales and grant from the Canadian Embassy. And the primary health care centre of the community was built with the help from Westbank and a Canadian agency as well.

Participation & Partnership

“Ensuring the participation of users and citizens in discussing, planning and arranging the very services and programs that will affect them is the fourth essential element in any practice aimed at reducing exclusion.” (Pierson, 2009, p56) This notion of participation is often used in the same context as partnership that “it may help to see that participation strives to achieve many of the same objectives as partnership, but focuses on local people”. (Pierson, 2009, p56) The projects are welcomed residents to participate, “One women can teach another, one child can learn plaster and to another” (said in documentary).

Partnership defined and thought as “involving a number of different organization in formal or semi-formal arrangement in which goals are agreed upon” (Pierson, 2009, p51-52). Partners frequently linked together in fighting social exclusion.

The Street Angels consortium built the community dental clinic and this clinic was link to major professional health organization in Brazil and it has been a valuable resource. And each project of the organization supports each other at the same time. For examples, the Angels sales project provide basic and original fund for the Angels School. And education helps residents here got more opportunity to get jobs, indirectly improves living conditions and helps a part of residents wake up and know what their rights are.

Social Citizenship
Social citizenship is a key element agenda to struggle with social exclusion, Marshall’s construction of social rights confirm the close relationship between citizenship and social inclusion. “This was wide, from economic welfare and security to the right to share in the social heritage and ‘to live the life of a civilised being according to the standards prevailing in the society’” (Sheppard et al, 2006, p22) and which is mean that residents could be treated as equal members of society. In a word, social citizenship is of particular importance because it is concerned with the welfare of people as citizens.

As said before, with education spreading, more and more people realize their human rights. Parts of women woke up and knew they are equal with men just like documentary showed, the women here know that both husband and wife have responsible with taking care of children and so on. Women of here were afraid of take pills that they thought their men will be unsatisfied; women have to give birth every year. In fact men can do something as well. But they are believed their husband. The organization trying to teach women and some of women woke up with these concepts.

Summary and conclusion

Above are strategies the Street Angels consortium used. How to raise incomes and improve the basic life conditions of residents are the basic jobs of the organization, and the social workers made basic strategies related to. The social support (or to say the organization’s partnership) influenced the area greatly. With help of all kinds of agency and organizations from variety counties, projects were built and developed. Other strategies, such as education, health care, feminism, are all developed based on the creasing of incomes and with the support of the social network.

Reference

Website:
Street Angels Charity UK http://streetangels.mrbongo.com/

Literature:
Pierson, J (2009). TACKLING SOCIAL EXCLUSION (2nd edition) London: Taylor &Francis Ltd.
Sheppard, M. (2006). SOCIAL WORK AND SOCIOAL EXCLUSION: The Idea of Practice. Aldershot: Ashgate Publishing Group.