On successful completion of this subject, students should be able to:

1. Describe theories, concepts and models underpinning social work and community welfare work.
2. Develop assessment and intervention skills or working with individuals, groups and communities within a context of the inequitable distribution of wealth and power.
3. Apply ethical issues related to working with individuals, groups and communities.
4. Apply professional decision making in the organisational contexts.

- Basic concepts underlying human service practice.
- Human Rights.
- Empowerment.
- Advocacy.
- Self-determination.
- Self-help.
- Social Justice.
- Democratic Participation.
- Anti-Oppressive Practice: gender, ethnicity, class, politics, Aboriginality, culture, religion, (dis)ability, age and sexual orientation.
- Theories underlying human services practice.
- Different ways of understanding the world.
- Different levels of theory: formal and informal.
- Working with individuals.
- An overview major models of casework.
- Assessment and intervention.
- Working with groups.
- Types of groups facilitated by human service workers.
- Principles of working for and with groups.
- Group dynamics and group processes.
- Stages of group development.
- Community Work.
- Personal, professional and organisational power and social control.
- Issues related to accountability.
- The inter relationship of the worker’s personal, professional values and those of their agency.
- Understanding of ethics and professional practice in the welfare sector and the role of training and supervision in supporting this.
- A Brief Introduction to Human Services in Contemporary Australia.
- The New ‘helping era’- Social Innovation in Human Service Practice.
- Human services within rural and remote regions of Australia.