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Community practice in social work has always been pulled between two competing impulses: should practitioners act as expert planners who diagnose community needs and design solutions, or should they serve as facilitators who enable residents to define and solve their own problems? This tension between professional authority and grassroots participation has driven the development of successive frameworks, each offering a different answer to the question of who should lead community change.
The first systematic framework for community practice emerged with the Settlement House Movement (1889–1920). Settlement workers such as Jane Addams and Ellen Gates Starr moved into poor urban neighborhoods, living alongside residents and organizing collective responses to poverty, child labor, and inadequate housing. The movement established community practice as a distinct approach within social work, separate from the individual casework that dominated the emerging profession. Its core commitment was environmental: rather than adjusting individuals to their circumstances, settlement workers sought to transform the social conditions that produced suffering. This placed the movement in direct tension with the Charity Organization Societies, which emphasized moral reform and individual responsibility. The Settlement House framework treated the community itself as both the client and the agent of change, a principle that later frameworks would repeatedly return to, challenge, and reinterpret.
By the mid-twentieth century, community practice had fragmented into a variety of local approaches with no shared vocabulary. In 1968, Jack Rothman published a typology that would define the field for the next two decades. His three-model framework—Locality Development, Social Planning, and Social Action—codified the competing visions that had been operating informally since the Settlement House era.
Locality Development (1968–1990) revived the Settlement House emphasis on grassroots participation. It assumed that communities already possessed the capacity to solve their own problems if given the right facilitative support. The practitioner's role was to build consensus, strengthen local relationships, and help residents identify shared goals. This model directly preserved the Settlement House commitment to democratic, bottom-up change, but it narrowed the focus by treating conflict as a barrier rather than a tool.
Social Planning (1968–1990) took the opposite stance. It positioned the practitioner as a technical expert who gathers data, analyzes needs, and designs rational interventions. The planner does not wait for community consensus; instead, the planner uses professional knowledge to allocate resources efficiently. This model absorbed the managerial logic that had grown within public welfare systems, and it coexisted uneasily with Locality Development by privileging expert authority over local voice.
Social Action (1968–1990) addressed power directly. It assumed that community problems stem from structural inequality and that change requires mobilizing disadvantaged groups to confront entrenched interests. The practitioner acts as an organizer and advocate, using conflict and negotiation to shift resources and decision-making power. Social Action differed from Locality Development by embracing confrontation rather than consensus, and it differed from Social Planning by treating the existing distribution of power as the problem rather than as a given.
Rothman's three models were not presented as a sequence; they were offered as a toolkit from which practitioners could choose depending on context. Yet the typology itself revealed a field unsure whether its primary allegiance was to expertise, participation, or justice. That uncertainty would soon provoke a critical response.
By the 1980s, a new generation of frameworks argued that Rothman's models, despite their surface diversity, shared a common weakness: they did not adequately analyze the power relations embedded in race, gender, class, and colonialism. The critical turn transformed community practice by insisting that every method—whether participatory or expert-led—carries assumptions about who holds authority and whose knowledge counts.
Empowerment Theory (1980–Present) built directly on Locality Development's participatory ideals but deepened them. Where Locality Development treated participation as a method for achieving community-defined goals, Empowerment Theory made the process of gaining power over one's life the central goal itself. Practitioners using this framework help individuals and groups recognize the structural sources of their problems, develop critical consciousness, and build the skills and networks needed to act collectively. Empowerment Theory differed from earlier frameworks by insisting that the outcome of community practice should be measured not only by material improvements but also by the increased capacity of marginalized people to shape the conditions of their own lives.
Feminist Community Practice (1980–Present) emerged as a direct critique of the power dynamics within all three of Rothman's models, including Social Action. Feminist practitioners argued that Social Action's confrontational style often replicated patriarchal patterns of leadership, privileging assertive, public-facing activism over relational, care-based organizing. Feminist Community Practice redefined community work by centering the experiences of women, attending to the intersection of gender with race and class, and valuing process as much as outcome. It insisted that how change is made—through inclusive dialogue, shared leadership, and attention to emotional labor—is inseparable from what change is achieved. This framework coexisted with Empowerment Theory but narrowed its focus by making gender a primary analytical lens.
Anti-Oppressive Practice (1990–Present) synthesized the insights of Empowerment Theory and Feminist Community Practice while broadening their scope. It provided a unified analytical framework that examines how multiple forms of oppression—racism, sexism, classism, colonialism, ableism—interact within community settings. Anti-Oppressive Practice transformed earlier critical frameworks by insisting that practitioners must continuously examine their own positions of privilege and power, even when working with marginalized communities. It did not replace Empowerment Theory or Feminist Community Practice; rather, it absorbed their core commitments into a more comprehensive ethical stance. Today, Anti-Oppressive Practice functions as a meta-framework that shapes how other methods are applied, requiring practitioners to ask not only "what works" but "who benefits and who is harmed by this approach?"
Alongside the critical turn, a different kind of alternative emerged. Asset-Based Community Development (ABCD) (1990–Present) was a direct methodological counter to the deficit-based needs assessments that characterized Social Planning. Where Social Planning began by cataloging what a community lacked—unemployment rates, housing shortages, health disparities—ABCD began by mapping what a community already had: the skills of its residents, the resources of its associations, the capacity of its local institutions. This framework revived the strengths-oriented ethos of Locality Development but gave it a more systematic methodology. ABCD did not reject the critical frameworks' attention to power, but it argued that sustainable change requires starting from assets rather than deficits, even in deeply unequal communities.
Today, no single framework dominates community practice. The field is characterized by pluralism, with practitioners drawing on multiple frameworks depending on the context. Empowerment Theory remains influential in work with marginalized groups, particularly in health promotion and community organizing. Feminist Community Practice continues to shape gender-focused initiatives and to challenge hierarchical leadership within social movements. Anti-Oppressive Practice has become a standard ethical lens in social work education, informing how practitioners approach everything from program evaluation to policy advocacy. ABCD is widely used in neighborhood revitalization and international development, where its practical, strengths-based methodology appeals to funders and community members alike.
The frameworks that remain active today share a broad agreement that community practice must attend to power, that participation is valuable, and that change should be driven by the people most affected by the problems being addressed. They also agree that the Settlement House Movement's environmental focus was correct: individual problems cannot be separated from their social context. Yet they disagree sharply on how to balance professional expertise with grassroots leadership. Empowerment Theory and Anti-Oppressive Practice tend to view professional expertise with suspicion, arguing that it can reinforce the very hierarchies community practice aims to dismantle. ABCD, by contrast, sees a constructive role for skilled facilitators who can help communities recognize and mobilize their own assets. Feminist Community Practice adds a further layer of disagreement by insisting that the internal dynamics of community organizations—who speaks, who is heard, who does the unseen work—are as important as the external outcomes they achieve. These disagreements are not signs of weakness; they are the living tensions that keep the field responsive to the complexity of real communities. The central question that animated the Settlement House Movement—who should lead community change—remains unanswered, and each framework offers a different, partial answer that practitioners must navigate in practice.