Helping Concept

There are times in life when we all need the help and support from others. Approaches to helping can vary significantly across different cultures. However, when defined through the perspective of the individual receiving assistance, the focus can shift towards empowering them to reach their full potential. This involves identifying their needs, setting goals to address those needs, developing actionable plans to achieve those goals, conducting continuous evaluations, and establishing a support team. Recognizing the strengths of clients not only aids in formulating effective goals and the pathways to achieve them, but also encourages individuals to pinpoint and utilize their strengths rather than concentrating solely on their weaknesses.

Helpful actions are evident worldwide, as people provide support to those in need. This includes the unhoused population, individuals living with a disability, those with mental health challenges, children, senior citizens, emotionally distressed youth, individuals who live in poverty, immigrants, refugees who are adjusting to new countries, and Indigenous Peoples who are grappling with the long impacts of the colonial legacy, such as intergenerational trauma, landlessness, and poverty. Dictionary.com (2023) defined help as follows:

to give or provide what is necessary to accomplish a task or satisfy a need; contribute strength or means to; render assistance to; cooperate effectively with; aid; assist; . . . to save; rescue; succor; . . . to make easier or less difficult; contribute to; facilitate; . . . to be useful or profitable to (definitions 1–4).

This definition indicates that help is provided if it is needed, and that helping enhances the strengths and resources of those who are supported. As a community support worker, you will be intervening where there is a specific need for assistance. To best understand a client’s need for help, we can reflect on the following questions: When have I been in need of help and received it from an organization? Did I receive the help I was seeking? What type of help did I receive? Who provided such help? Did it help to solve the problem or the needs that caused us to seek help? These reflective questions are meant to generate ideas about the concept of helping from personal perspectives and experiences.

CSWs must be culturally aware, sensitive, and attuned to the needs of the client. As the history of colonization demonstrates, the intentions of helping may be entangled with unequal power dynamics and perpetuate systemic discrimination. Consider your position of power in relation to the clients you serve and how your role and life experiences that shape your worldview may be drastically different from the clients’. As a worker, you may feel you are doing the right thing, but your client and their lived experience may perceive the help being offered as harmful to them or not in alignment with their needs.

People choose to help others for several reasons. Psychologists have suggested that people assist others to fulfill their inner needs, for evolutionary forces, for egoistic concerns, and for selfless or altruistic motives (Poepsel & Shroeder, 2024, para. 16). Our evolutionary history might clarify why we have supportive connections with relatives, and that we desire to assist those nearest to us because of our genetic background. My personal experience has shown that this is true because I, Leonce, co-author of this book, grew up in the helping hands of my extended family; not only my parents and siblings, but also my uncle, grandparents, aunts, neighbours, teachers, fellow students, and others within the community. I grew up realizing that helping is noble. I feel extremely comfortable when I help others in certain ways because my Haya tribe culture from Northwest Tanzania emphasizes the need to help people who are sick, who lost someone in the family, or who need additional support.

Poepsel and Schroeder (2024) also discussed egoistic concerns, or assisting others for selfish reasons. The negative state relief theory suggested that people help others to alleviate their own negative emotions, and the positive state relief theory proposed that helping others has personal emotional benefits. People help others because they are passionate about it; helping enhances their emotional interests and satisfaction. Some people help others because they expect a return or reward of some kind; other people volunteer in organizations so they can include this information on their resumés. The last reason that people help is altruistic motives (Poepsel & Schroeder, 2024), meaning that they help to enhance others’ well-being. For example, during winter they help unhoused people who live on the street to secure shelter rather than living in the cold, which may jeopardize their well-being. Altruistic help is intentional and supports fellow human beings in bettering their lives. However, helping also has challenges or obstacles, which will be discussed in the next section.

References

Dictionary.com, LLC. (2023). Help. In dictionary.com dictionary. https://www.dictionary.com/browse/help

Poepsel, D. L., & Schroeder, D. A. (2024). Helping and prosocial behavior. In R. Biswas-Diener & E. Diener (Eds.), Noba textbook series: Psychology. DEF. http://noba.to/tbuw7afg