Partnership Welfare between Decisions, Actions and Mediations: The Strategic Role of the Social Worker

The operational strategies of the new welfare policies envisage and increasingly include collaborative and partnership actions between the public and private sectors, which need social experts capable to generate connections between the parties involved in terms of action, planning, organization and evaluation of social health services. The paper mainly considers the potential result that social workers can achieve through the ability to relate different areas of intervention through the use of social mediation in operational terms. The use of mediation is not an attempt to resolve conflicts between opposing parties, but the authentic and effective dimension of trifocal social intervention overcoming the two-way relationship between professional and user, which integrates roles, functions and strategic actions through the simultaneous involvement of multidimensional actors (individuals, communities, institutions), who interact in the proximal, relational and social sphere surrounding the professional and the user in a specific territorial context. Such a negotiation should give rise to a series of hypotheses to be used in the construction of a shared vision of the difficult situation that leads to the identification of possible solutions and tasks to be implemented to achieve the solutions proposed. In such a perspective, the paper tends to focus on the strategic role of the social worker. The new social policies see more and more actions of shared responsibility. For this reason, the social worker must be trained for this period of innovative change, and must be able to know how to mediate the different visions of reality that each interlocutor supports by focusing on possible solutions.