Radical Approaches to Anti-Poverty Strategies

Radical social work repoliticises the underlying causes of poverty and aligns itself in solidarity with marginalised people while aiming to dismantle policies and practices that disempower and oppress people living with poverty. Conceptualising poverty not only as material deprivation but also as a social justice issue reinforces social workers acting to enable the self-determination of people living with poverty, a contrast to the current neoliberal policy regimes in most countries across the globe. Poverty alleviation from a radical perspective includes four key dimensions: redistribution, recognition, representation and temporal justice. These principles are explored here by revisiting a poverty alleviation project the Family Centre Project in Melbourne, Australia. This provides a basis to reimagine the learnings from the project in order to reinvigorate social work practice. Recent advocacy for Poverty-Aware Practice is related to this exploration of radical strategies for poverty alleviation to add a critical constructivist epistemology to the focus on power relations, knowledge production and an ethics of solidarity.