Helping as Solidarity, Not Service: A Critical Literature Review of and Social Work and Mental Health Practice.

Abstract

This literature review critically examines the helping process as both a foundational framework in social work and a contested site shaped by power, culture, and politics. Beginning with the historical roots of charity movements, casework, and welfare state structures, it traces the development of canonical models such as Compton and Galaway’s problem-solving approach and Sheafor and Horejsi’s planned change framework. While these models provided clarity and professional legitimacy, they also reflected Western, linear, and managerial assumptions. The review then engages with contemporary critiques, highlighting trauma-informed, anti-oppressive, and strengths-based perspectives that challenge rigid frameworks. Insights from lived experience movements, Indigenous worldviews, and Global South approaches emphasise helping as relational, cyclical, and collective. Interdisciplinary contributions from philosophy, sociology, and anthropology further expand the understanding of engagement, stigma, and rituals of care. Radical, anarchist, and abolitionist critiques expose the helping process as a potential tool of surveillance and control, while offering alternatives grounded in mutual aid and solidarity. Synthesising these tensions, the review identifies key debates between linearity and non-linearity, professional authority and client expertise, and service delivery and solidarity. The implications for practice include embracing flexibility, prioritising cultural safety, and positioning helping as an act of resistance and hope. Ultimately, this review argues that the helping process must be reimagined beyond technical phases and bureaucratic scripts, towards a liberatory practice rooted in dignity, justice, and collective care.

Keywords: helping process; social work practice; decolonial approaches; trauma-informed care; co-production; power and ethics; radical social work; lived experience; solidarity; critical practice.

Historical and Political Context

The “helping process” in social work is deeply rooted in its historical and political context. Early approaches emerged from the charity organisation societies and settlement house movements of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. As Chenoweth and McAuliffe (2020) explain, these movements emphasised moral reform, discipline, and case-by-case relief, often shaped by middle-class, Christian values. Over time, these ideas gave rise to the casework tradition, where the helping process was framed as a structured sequence of assessment, diagnosis, and intervention. This provided clarity for a new profession but also reinforced the bureaucratic logic of the modern welfare state.

By the mid-twentieth century, the helping process had become closely tied to state welfare administration. This link created an ongoing tension: while the state offered resources to vulnerable populations, it also imposed systems of categorisation, surveillance, and control. Foucault (1977) has argued that such professionalised processes were never neutral—they functioned as technologies of governance that shaped behaviour and regulated the poor. In this sense, the helping process was simultaneously a tool of care and an instrument of social regulation.

These contradictions remain visible in contemporary practice. As Healy (2014) notes, neoliberal reforms from the late twentieth century onwards intensified managerial approaches to social work, transforming the helping process into an outcome-driven and efficiency-focused model. Phases like “intake,” “assessment,” and “review” were reframed as ways for agencies to monitor workers, measure outputs, and justify funding. Maidment and Egan (2021) argue that this shift risks reducing the relational heart of social work to bureaucratic checklists, undermining the ethical commitments of the profession. Taken together, this history shows that the helping process is a socially constructed framework, shaped by political economies and shifting ideologies. Understanding these origins allows practitioners to see the process as a contested space where care and control are constantly negotiated.

Canonical Models of the Helping Process

One of the most influential frameworks in the literature is the problem-solving model developed by Compton and Galaway (1999). They describe the helping process as a sequence of stages—engagement, assessment, intervention, and evaluation—that provide clarity and structure for practitioners. Their contribution has been especially significant in training new social workers, as it offers a step-by-step guide to practice that feels concrete and achievable.

Building on this, Sheafor and Horejsi (2015) proposed the planned change model, which expands the process to include intake, contracting, and termination as distinct phases. This model reflects the increasing formalisation of social work practice within organisational settings, where documenting stages of work and making goals explicit became highly valued. While this structure offers transparency and accountability, it also mirrors the bureaucratic culture of agencies, raising questions about whether the process serves the needs of clients or the systems that govern them.

Cournoyer (2017) took the discussion in another direction by shifting the emphasis from phases to practice skills. His model includes tasks such as preparing, beginning, exploring, assessing, contracting, working, evaluating, and terminating, but the focus is on the micro-skills and competencies required to carry these out. This makes his work particularly relevant for practitioners seeking to develop their interpersonal effectiveness, and their understanding of abstract phases.

Although these canonical models differ in detail, they share important assumptions. They all frame the helping process as linear and professional-led, positioning the social worker as the one guiding the client through predefined stages. This offers clarity and predictability but risks oversimplifying the complexity of human experience. As Chenoweth and McAuliffe (2020) remind us, real-world practice is rarely neat or orderly, and the assumption of linearity can obscure the messy, relational, and political realities of social work.

Ethics, Values, and Skills

Alongside structured models of practice, the helping process is also shaped by a strong foundation in ethics and values. Maidment and Egan (2021) emphasise that effective social work must go beyond technical phases and instead be rooted in anti-oppressive and strengths-based approaches. They argue that every stage of the process—whether engagement, assessment, or intervention—carries ethical implications about how power is exercised and whose voices are prioritised. This perspective highlights that the helping process is never just procedural but deeply political.

The Australian Association of Social Workers (AASW, 2020) provides a Code of Ethics that guides professional conduct. The code stresses respect for human dignity, the right to self-determination, and a commitment to social justice. These principles are intended to safeguard against misuse of professional power and ensure that the helping process aligns with the broader mission of the profession. However, as Healy (2014) points out, codes of ethics can provide only a baseline. They do not eliminate the structural inequalities that clients face, nor do they prevent organisational demands—such as performance measurement or risk management—from undermining ethical commitments.

Cournoyer (2017) complements this discussion by underscoring the importance of practice skills within the helping process. For him, skills such as active listening, empathy, and contracting are expressions of values in action. In other words, skills are the vehicles through which ethical principles are realised in practice. This perspective helps bridge the gap between abstract codes and the day-to-day realities of counselling, casework, or community practice.

Taken together, these perspectives show that the helping process a framework for action as well as a site where values, ethics, and skills intertwine. Social workers are called to navigate the tension between professional obligations, organisational constraints, and the lived realities of clients. As Maidment and Egan (2021) suggest, it is precisely within these tensions that the true character of social work practice is revealed.

Contemporary Critiques and Expansions

While canonical models provide structure, many scholars argue that they fail to capture the non-linear and fluid realities of practice. Chenoweth and McAuliffe (2020) point out that in real-world contexts—especially in crisis work or with clients experiencing trauma—the helping process rarely unfolds in neat, sequential stages. Practitioners often move back and forth between engagement, assessment, and intervention, or may revisit earlier steps as new issues emerge. This challenges the assumption of linearity that underpins many textbook models.

Another area of expansion relates to the rise of digital and online counselling. As Maidment and Egan (2021) note, the COVID-19 pandemic accelerated the shift to telehealth, requiring practitioners to rethink how engagement and assessment occur when face-to-face contact is limited. Building trust through a screen, navigating digital divides, and ensuring confidentiality in online spaces all complicate traditional understandings of the helping process. These developments highlight how practice must adapt to technological change and global crises.

The integration of trauma-informed approaches has also reshaped thinking about the helping process. Porges (2018), through his work on the polyvagal theory, shows that engagement and assessment are relational and neurobiological processes. Establishing safety and co-regulating the nervous system become central tasks before any formal intervention can take place. This perspective reframes engagement as an ongoing ethical stance of attunement and presence.

Finally, the literature on cultural safety and decolonial practice insists that helping processes must be responsive to the needs of diverse communities. For Indigenous clients, for example, trust-building often requires extended time, collective involvement, and recognition of historical trauma (Maidment & Egan, 2021). Rather than treating culture as an “add-on,” this scholarship positions cultural safety as central to the very definition of effective practice.

Taken together, these critiques and expansions highlight a key shift: the helping process is no longer seen as a rigid sequence of stages, but as a dynamic, relational, and context-dependent practice. This contemporary turn opens the door for more flexible, culturally grounded, and trauma-informed approaches that better reflect the complexities of social work today.

Lived Experience and Client Perspectives

In recent decades, scholars and practitioners have begun to recognise that the helping process looks very different when viewed from the perspective of clients rather than practitioners. Chenoweth and McAuliffe (2020) argue that while models often describe a structured series of professional actions, clients may experience these moments as deeply personal, fragmented, or even contradictory. For some, the first encounter with a social worker is not a neutral “engagement stage” but a moment shaped by anxiety, mistrust, or hope.

The inclusion of lived experience voices has been particularly important in reshaping how we think about practice. As Beresford (2019) highlights, service users have long critiqued the top-down nature of traditional approaches, noting that the helping process often reproduces unequal power relations. Instead, a growing movement calls for co-production, where clients are recipients of services as well as active partners in shaping interventions and outcomes.

For clients from marginalised groups, the helping process can be further complicated by experiences of discrimination and systemic barriers. Research by Gray, Coates, and Yellow Bird (2016) demonstrates how First Nations clients often describe mainstream services as alienating when they fail to honour cultural ways of knowing and healing. From this perspective, the process of engagement is about decolonising relationships, making space for Indigenous knowledge, ceremony, and community authority.

Clients have also emphasised the importance of flexibility and authenticity in practice. As Ferguson (2018) notes in his ethnographic studies of child protection, families often respond most positively when workers show humanity, humility, and consistency, rather than rigid adherence to procedural scripts. This suggests that the most meaningful helping processes may unfold through the everyday relational acts of listening, respecting, and walking alongside clients, not linear models.

Taken together, the literature suggests that centring lived experience requires a paradigm shift. It means reimagining the helping process as something co-created, grounded in trust, reciprocity, and recognition of the client’s expertise in their own life as opposed to something “done to clients.”

Interdisciplinary Insights

The helping process has never belonged solely to social work—it draws deeply from other disciplines that expand how we understand care, power, and human connection. Philosophers like Emmanuel Levinas (1969) remind us that ethics is about codes and rules as well as about our infinite responsibility to the Other. From this lens, the very first moment of engagement is a profound ethical event—where the worker is called into responsibility by the presence of another person in need.

Sociology has also provided fertile ground. Erving Goffman (1963), for example, explored how stigma shapes encounters between “helpers” and “helped.” His insights into role performance suggest that much of the helping relationship is impression management—both clients and workers negotiate identities in ways that reflect broader social scripts. This reframes “assessment” as a performance, where vulnerability, expertise, and legitimacy are constantly being negotiated.

Anthropological work adds yet another layer. Across cultures, helping often takes the form of rituals of care and collective healing rather than individualised interventions. For example, Duranti (1997) points to how meaning-making in ritual practices binds communities together, while contemporary anthropologists of health illustrate how land-based practices—such as Aboriginal healing circles or Māori Whānau Ora models—embed helping within kinship, ceremony, and relationship to place. These insights remind us that Western, stage-based models are only one way of conceptualising helping; globally, helping is far more cyclical, spiritual, and communal. Taken together, these interdisciplinary contributions reveal that the helping process is an ethical, social, and cultural phenomenon, woven into broader human practices of care, identity, and belonging, as well as a technical and professional framework

Decolonial & Global South Perspectives

If Western textbooks describe the helping process as a linear, professionalised sequence, scholars from Indigenous and Global South traditions remind us that this is not the only—or even the most effective—way of understanding care. Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) insists that Western models are inseparable from colonial histories of knowledge and governance, where “help” was often tied to assimilation and control. In contrast, Indigenous frameworks emphasise relationality, collective responsibility, and connection to land.

A striking example is the Māori model of Whānau Ora, which reframes helping not just around individuals, but around families, kinship, and holistic wellbeing (Durie, 1998). Similarly, Aboriginal healing practices often embed support within community gatherings, storytelling, and spiritual connection to Country, offering an alternative to fragmented service delivery. These approaches suggest that engagement and intervention are not discrete steps but ongoing processes of belonging, reciprocity, and balance.

From the Global South, liberation psychology offers further challenges. Ignacio Martín-Baró (1994), writing in the context of political violence in El Salvador, argued that psychology and social work must move beyond adapting individuals to oppressive systems. Instead, helping should be understood as a political act of resistance, directed at dismantling the social conditions that produce suffering. Here, the “helping process” is less about phases of intervention and more about solidarity in struggle.

These perspectives collectively expose the limits of Western managerialism. While mainstream models tend to isolate problems within the individual and prescribe solutions through professional expertise, Indigenous and Global South approaches highlight cyclical, collective, and spiritual dimensions of healing. For practitioners, this calls for more than cultural “sensitivity”—it requires a willingness to decentre Western paradigms and create space for alternative epistemologies to lead practice.

Radical, Decolonial, and Anarchist Interventions

A growing body of literature questions whether the helping process, as framed in Western models, can ever be neutral. Instead, these perspectives argue that helping is always entangled with power, history, and politics. From a decolonial standpoint, Linda Tuhiwai Smith (2012) reminds us that Western helping frameworks emerged through colonial projects, where “care” often meant assimilation and control. Indigenous models instead prioritise relationality, kinship, and connection to land. For example, Māori approaches such as Whānau Ora (Durie, 1998) place families, not individuals, at the centre of wellbeing, while Aboriginal healing circles embed helping within community, story, and spiritual connection to Country.

Similarly, Ignacio Martín-Baró (1994), writing in El Salvador, developed liberation psychology, which positions helping as a political act against oppression rather than an adjustment to it. These approaches foreground collective healing and systemic change, challenging the individualised, linear focus of dominant models.

Radical and anarchist traditions extend these critiques by questioning the very legitimacy of state-bound, professionalised care. Ferguson and Lavalette (2018) argue that social work often acts as an arm of the state, managing populations rather than transforming structural injustice. Anarchist thinkers like Ward (2011) and Shantz (2015) call for mutual aid frameworks, where helping is grounded in solidarity, reciprocity, and survival outside hierarchical systems. This perspective reframes “engagement” not as rapport-building but as co-creating trust in resisting oppressive systems.

Together, these perspectives expose a key contradiction: while Western models emphasise professional authority and procedural order, decolonial and anarchist approaches imagine helping as collective, cyclical, and liberatory. What unites them is a refusal to accept helping as neutral—insisting instead that it is always political, and that true helping may sometimes mean resisting the very systems that define social work today.

Power, Policy, and Neoliberalism

Even when framed as care, the helping process cannot be separated from the policy environments and power structures in which it operates. Under neoliberal governance, social work is increasingly shaped by risk discourse, managerialism, and austerity politics. As Rogowski (2013) notes, frontline workers are often pressured to deliver “help” in ways that meet Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) rather than client needs. This bureaucratisation reshapes the helping process into a form of gatekeeping, where eligibility criteria, risk assessments, and compliance monitoring overshadow relational practice.

Power dynamics also extend to the dual role of social workers as both helpers and agents of surveillance. Ferguson (2004) highlights how child protection work, for example, can oscillate between offering support and enforcing state control, blurring the boundaries between care and coercion. For clients, this duality can mean that engagement is experienced less as an invitation to trust and more as a test of compliance.

Critical race and feminist scholars sharpen this critique by showing how these policy frameworks reinforce whiteness, heteronormativity, and class privilege. As Dominelli (2002) argues, the neoliberal turn in welfare does not affect all populations equally: women, racialised communities, and people living in poverty are disproportionately subjected to punitive measures disguised as “help.” Here, the helping process becomes a site where systemic inequalities are reproduced under the veneer of professionalism.

At the same time, workers themselves are affected by these shifts. Scholars like Baines (2017) describe how austerity and managerialism erode practitioners’ ability to act creatively, leaving them caught between their ethical commitments to clients and the organisational demands of their employers. In this sense, the helping process is constrained not only for service users but also for workers struggling under neoliberal conditions. Taken together, the literature shows that policy is not a backdrop but an active force in shaping what “helping” looks like in practice. Under neoliberalism, the process risks being hollowed out—transformed into compliance-driven transactions rather than relational, liberatory acts of care.

The Affective & Embodied Dimension

While much of the literature frames the helping process in terms of models, policies, and structures, there is also a growing recognition that helping is deeply affective and embodied. Arlie Hochschild (2012) famously described this as emotional labour—the effort of managing one’s feelings in order to meet the expectations of a professional role. For social workers, this might mean holding empathy and composure in the face of trauma, grief, or anger, even when those emotions resonate deeply within their own bodies.

Chenoweth and McAuliffe (2020) remind us that helping is technical as well as relational, requiring humility, attunement, and presence. Engagement, in this sense, is not a phase to be checked off but an ongoing embodied stance. Workers rely on tone of voice, body language, and nervous system regulation to co-create a sense of safety with clients—something trauma theorists like Stephen Porges (2018) frame as co-regulation. This highlights that helping is not only about what is said but also about the felt atmosphere of the encounter.

Yet, this affective dimension also brings risks. Empathy can tip into exhaustion, burnout, or vicarious trauma, as workers absorb the emotional weight of others’ suffering. Scholars like Bride (2007) have shown how secondary traumatic stress is common in frontline practice, raising ethical questions about how organisations support (or fail to support) the well-being of workers themselves. Without space for reflection, supervision, and collective care, the emotional costs of helping can undermine both worker resilience and client relationships.

This focus on embodiment also challenges overly rationalist or procedural accounts of practice. If the helping process is lived through bodies in relation, then its success depends not only on professional skills but also on the capacity to be emotionally present, grounded, and responsive in the moment. Helping, in this sense, is less a formula and more a shared human encounter that unfolds through gestures, silences, and feelings as much as through structured interventions.

Practice Implications

These tensions shape how practitioners develop their philosophies and day-to-day approaches. One clear implication is the need for flexibility over rigidity. Compton and Galaway, as well as Sheafor and Horejsi, gave us frameworks that are structured and useful for training, but as Stephen Porges points out in his trauma research, life rarely follows a tidy sequence. Workers need to be ready to adapt, pause, revisit, and co-create the process with clients.

Another lesson is that engagement is ongoing, relational, and political. Chenoweth and McAuliffe describe helping as a relational act that requires humility and presence. For Indigenous thinkers like Linda Tuhiwai Smith, and for liberation psychologists such as Ignacio Martín-Baró, engagement means embedding helping in collective, land-connected, and political contexts. In practice, this might mean privileging Elders, peer workers, or community-led strategies alongside professional expertise.

A third implication is the importance of respecting lived experience as expertise. Peter Beresford has argued passionately that co-production must move beyond tokenism, recognising clients as genuine partners. For some services, this could mean hiring peer workers; for others, it might involve building structures where clients take the lead in decision-making. Critical voices like Iain Ferguson and Michael Lavalette also remind us that practice cannot stop at the micro level—it must also involve naming and resisting systemic oppression. For example, supporting a client through housing insecurity could also involve joining grassroots advocacy around affordable housing.

Finally, writers such as Arlie Hochschild and Brian Bride highlight the emotional costs of this work, from burnout to vicarious trauma. Reflexivity, supervision, and collective care become ethical necessities, not luxuries. Without them, the sustainability of liberatory practice is compromised. Taken together, these implications point toward a philosophy of practice that is adaptive, relational, decolonial, and politically conscious. Helping, in this view, is not simply service delivery—it is solidarity in action.

Practice Implications

The tensions have direct consequences for how practitioners shape their philosophies and everyday choices in practice. One of the clearest lessons is the importance of flexibility over rigidity. While writers like Compton and Galaway, along with Sheafor and Horejsi, provided structured models that are undeniably useful for teaching beginners the basics of casework, they risk oversimplifying the messiness of real lives. Stephen Porges, working from a trauma perspective, shows that human behaviour often unfolds in cyclical or overlapping ways, especially when nervous system dysregulation is present. For practitioners, this means being prepared to return to earlier phases, pause, or move fluidly, rather than clinging to a prescriptive sequence.

Another implication is that engagement must be understood as ongoing, relational, and political. Chenoweth and McAuliffe describe the helping relationship as a deeply relational act requiring humility, authenticity, and presence. Indigenous scholar Linda Tuhiwai Smith reminds us that relationality extends beyond the individual to include community, ancestors, and land. Similarly, liberation psychologist Ignacio Martín-Baró argued that healing cannot be divorced from the political and social conditions in which people live. This suggests that in practice, engagement is about rapport-building as well as about creating spaces of trust that acknowledge systemic oppression and collective struggle.

A third lesson is the need to centre lived experience as a form of expertise. Peter Beresford has been a strong advocate for co-production, insisting that services must go beyond tokenistic consultation and genuinely embed the knowledge of service users into design and delivery. Survivor-led movements like Mad Pride show how helping relationships can be reconfigured as horisontal and reciprocal, offering models where clients are not passive recipients but active participants in their own support. In practice, this might involve hiring peer workers, establishing client advisory groups, or simply recognising that the client’s knowledge of their own life is indispensable.

There is also a call to integrate political consciousness into everyday practice. Iain Ferguson and Michael Lavalette argue that social work cannot remain neutral in the face of inequality; helping must include advocacy, activism, and solidarity. This might mean supporting an individual client through their housing crisis while also campaigning for structural changes in affordable housing policy. It’s a shift from seeing practice as apolitical case management to recognising it as a potential site of resistance.

Finally, practitioners must recognise the affective and embodied demands of the work. Arlie Hochschild described care as emotional labour, and Brian Bride has shown how vicarious trauma and burnout are endemic in the field. Without reflexivity, peer support, and collective strategies of care, the sustainability of liberatory practice is at risk. Attending to one’s own regulation, community support, and boundaries becomes self-care as well as an ethical responsibility, because it sustains the worker’s capacity to engage meaningfully. Together, these insights point towards a re-imagined practice philosophy: one that is flexible, relational, decolonial, and politically attuned. Helping in this sense is not service delivery or the application of a model, but an act of solidarity in motion—walking alongside clients, communities, and movements toward justice.

Practice Implications in Action

Individual Counselling with Complex Trauma

Imagine working with a client who has survived childhood abuse and is experiencing housing instability. Rather than following a rigid “intake → assessment → intervention → closure” sequence, the worker might move fluidly between phases depending on the client’s nervous system regulation, as Stephen Porges (2018) reminds us. Some days, simply co-regulating through calm presence is the intervention. Engagement here is not a one-time task but something that must be re-established in every session. The practitioner validates the client’s lived expertise, recognising—echoing Beresford—that the client knows best what safety looks like for them.

Group Work with Refugees and Asylum Seekers

In a community-based support group, the Western model might suggest structured “goal setting” or “problem solving.” But informed by Ignacio Martín-Baró’s liberation psychology, the group could instead focus on storytelling, solidarity, and connecting personal struggles to systemic injustice. This reframes helping as collective empowerment, and individual adjustment. The facilitator positions themselves less as an expert and more as a co-learner, much like Linda Tuhiwai Smith’s emphasis on relational knowledge that honours community wisdom and land-based connection.

Youth Justice Practice

With a young person involved in the criminal justice system, a conventional approach might prioritise “behaviour change” plans. But drawing on Goffman’s analysis of stigma and role performance, the practitioner instead works to dismantle the imposed “offender identity.” They highlight the young person’s strengths, involve their family and community, and resist surveillance-driven interventions. Here, helping becomes about co-creating pathways of belonging and resisting the structural forces that criminalise marginalised youth.

Policy and Advocacy Context

When supporting a woman facing eviction, the worker might address her immediate housing crisis while also engaging in systemic advocacy, echoing Ferguson and Lavalette’s call for politicised practice. This could involve joining housing justice coalitions, amplifying client voices in public forums, and pushing back against welfare policies that reduce practice to bureaucratic gatekeeping. Helping becomes solidarity-in-action, and service delivery.

Practitioner Self-Work and Collective Care

Finally, the emotional demands of practice mean that sustaining radical and decolonial approaches requires collective care. As Hochschild reminds us, this work is heavy with emotional labour. A worker may engage in reflective supervision, peer debriefing, or community rituals of care to prevent burnout and ensure ethical attunement. This aligns with trauma-informed principles: just as clients need co-regulation, so too do workers in order to continue showing up with presence and humility.

Conclusion

The helping process, on the surface, looks simple: a sequence of steps, a roadmap to guide practice. Writers like Compton and Galaway framed it as structured problem-solving, while Sheafor and Horejsi leaned on planned change as a way to keep work orderly and teachable. These frameworks gave the profession clarity and legitimacy, especially in its formative years. But as the literature reminds us, beneath that order lies contestation. Stephen Porges shows us that human beings don’t live in neat stages—they carry trauma in their nervous systems, and helping must bend to that reality. Goffman warns us that stigma shapes every encounter, often silencing or shaming clients before they even begin to “engage.” Linda Tuhiwai Smith pushes further, urging us to see that helping cannot be abstracted from land, history, and colonisation. And Ignacio Martín-Baró calls out the political nature of our work, reminding us that to help in the Global South—or in any oppressed community—is to stand against injustice, not just patch over wounds.

When we put these voices together, the helping process transforms. It ceases to be just a professional script and instead becomes a living, relational, and political practice. Helping is not only what happens in the counselling room; it is also what happens in communities, in policies, and in movements for justice. It is solidarity rather than service, co-creation rather than control. For practitioners, this means holding tensions with humility: balancing structure with flexibility, expertise with deep listening, and care with political action. It means recognising, as Ferguson and Lavalette argue, that social work is always entangled with systems of power—and choosing, wherever possible, to align our practice with liberation rather than surveillance.

Ultimately, the helping process is not just a framework we inherit; it is a site we actively reshape. The task before us is to honour its roots while refusing to let it be captured by bureaucratic or colonial logics. In this way, helping becomes a practice of resistance, hope, and radical imagination—an ongoing journey of building worlds where dignity, justice, and collective care are the foundation.

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