Author(s): Wayne McCashen

Psychology & Counselling

A practical guide to the Strengths Approach for Social Workers, Psychologists, Counsellors and anyone who works with people. The Strengths Approach as a model shifts focus from power-over to power-with; from deficits to capacities; from expert-focussed to the-client-as-expert. Author, Wayne McCashen, clearly and comprehensively describes the ideas, values, beliefs, and frameworks that help create respectful and socially-just ways of working with people. Over the years St Luke's has provided training and consultancy services in strengths-based practice to thousands of human service workers and hundreds of organisations. In The Strengths Approach principal trainer and author, Wayne McCashen, gathers together the material that is explored in these trainings. He clearly and comprehensively describes the ideas, values, beliefs, and frameworks that help create respectful and socially-just ways of working with people. This book is full of invaluable practice wisdom gathered over many years and anecdotes and examples of strengths-based practice in action. The book explores: Principles, skills, tools and frameworks Power-with and power-over Labelling Strengths and exceptions Pictures of the future The column approach Client-owned recording Supervision Community building Organisational culture ...and much more. The following is a short extract from the opening chapter: When asked the question, 'What sort of society do you want?' most people describe qualities such as social harmony, peace, justice, respect, sharing, mutual support and purpose. When thinking about this, people often imagine a society different to the one they observe and experience. The impetus to do this comes from experiencing and observing what happens when these qualities are not present. However, the capacity to imagine what 'could be' is made richly possible by our lived experience-people's personal experience and observation of what happens when respect, collaboration, inclusion, justice and support are present. In other words, people have aspirations that people are made possible more by their positive experiences than their negative ones. These experiences are lived every day in communities, groups, neighbourhoods, families, workplaces, schools, clubs, other organisations or institutions, as well as in random encounters, lateral ties and informal links. The connection between people's strengths represented through real stories of lived experience and their aspirations for something better, is the key to every successful action for change. It is crucial to hope and an essential characteristic of the strengths approach. A must for social workers, educators, governments, community groups, organisations, businesses, families, teams and anyone interested in socially-just ways of sharing power and creating change.