Human Rights-Based Community Practice in the United States

This book is organized around major human rights concerns, with a focus on community organizing to secure economic and social rights and to address forms of social exclusion and inequality in the United States.

Chapter 1 provides an overview of human rights, highlighting the importance of rights-based practice for community social work. It lays the conceptual groundwork for a rights-based approach to community practice, contrasting this method with conventional needs-based approaches within community social work. Chapters 2 through 4 address rights-based community practice through the lens of specific economic and social rights: health, housing and food. Focusing on community practice through local and state-wide campaigns for different rights provides an in-depth illustration of how a particular right is defined and successful pathways to secure the right. Chapter 5 concludes the book with examples of several methods to assess human rights realization at the community level and prioritize local level efforts from a rights-based perspective.