Social work practice involves a dual mission: to assist clients and to change society. These two distinctive branches of social work emerged in the United States from the Charity Organization Societies and from the Settlement House Movement. The services performed by the Charity Organization Societies later became known as casework. The Settlement House Movement activities eventually developed into group work and community organizations. The challenge of modern social work is to balance the dual focus of the profession by providing for the individual's needs within the context of his or her environment.
The social work profession emerged from the complex social needs that developed in Europe and North America as a result of urbanization and industrialization. Prior to the Industrial Revolution, aid to the poverty-stricken was administered either through "indoor" or "outdoor" relief. Indoor relief was based on the institutional model--workhouses and almhouses where the able-bodied poor could seek refuge from the miseries of life. Outdoor relief did not require the institutionalization of the recipient. Although outdoor relief was popular in Europe and North America during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, its popularity waned by the nineteenth century as the poor grew increasingly dependent on this type of assistance. Rank (1994) cites de Tocqueville's assessment of this dependency, " . . . giving relief to people in their own homes encouraged dependence, broke their spirit, corrupted their character, and made them feel entitled to a free livelihood from the state" (p. 13). Thus by the middle of the 19th century and up until the Great Depression, indoor relief was the dominant method of providing assistance to the poor (Rank, 1994, p. 13).
The work of charity societies, begun in the mid-19th century, eventually led the United States back to the outdoor model of social welfare. Charity societies were the pred...