Abstract

The reference to community and community social work in Italy has undergone a semantic evolution that, while on the one hand has enriched its scope and potential, on the other exposes it to ambivalences of which public decision-makers and social workers need to become aware. Rereading the trajectories that community work has gone through from the post-war period to the beginning of the new millennium, the essay explores how its different operational modulations within welfare systems are connected with the different weight with which certain sociological meanings of “communityµ and “solidarityµ have historically prevailed. In the last part, the research explores two organizational models of local welfare explicitly oriented by reference to the community and community work (the “educating communitiesµ and the “community foundationsµ), searching in them for the reserves of possibility that community welfare can still express in the current historical conjuncture profoundly marked by the cumulative effects of the economic, health and ecological crises.