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to city. The best approach for information with regard to a client who is a Mason is by letter to the master of the particular lodge of which he is or has been a member. If this is not known, a letter to the grand secretary for the state will usually bring the name of the master of the particular lodge and its address. Inquiry of the client's lodge should include a definite statement as to the reasons for asking information, give the possibilities of his case so far as known, and ask for advice. Non-resident Masons in need of assistance are usually cared for by a local Masonic relief association; the order is not a relief body, however, but a fraternal one.

A hospital social service department was interested in a man whose arm had been disabled by a fall. A Masonic lodge in another city sent assistance, but explained (through the local Masonic relief association) that the recipient had often been dependent before the accident. As his arm got better, he showed little inclination to find work for himself, and the relative and the Masonic lodge that had been helping both agreed to give their aid through an agency for homeless men which tried to stimulate his powers of self-help.

SUMMARY OF THIS CHAPTER

1. The unusual source newly discovered and evaluated and then held in reserve for the right occasion is one test of diagnostic skill. It is a better test than the attainment of a certain minimum (even of a fairly high minimum) of ground invariably covered in every case.

2. The policeman's strong points as a source of information are his intimate knowledge of neighborhood standards and his first-hand witness of the goings and comings within the neighborhood. His weak points are his political and other relations to the people, which tend to make him as unsatisfactory as any strictly neighborhood source.

3. If the policeman is too much exposed to neighborhood influences, many public officials, who are desk men, are not enough so. As a means of arriving at a common understanding, personal interviews with them, in which their exclusively desk point of view can be supplemented, are far better than letters.

4. Among the business sources cited in this chapter are some implying relatively slight contacts, such as insurance collecting, the moving of furniture or trunks, the sale of a sewing machine, etc. These are mentioned, not because they are frequently of value, but because they illustrate the process by which an item of circumstantial evidence may be so used as to uncover important data.

5. Benefit societies of the insurance type have more marked fraternal features in the foreign groups. The one who proposed a given person for membership in such an order is frequently well acquainted with him and with his family.

W

CHAPTER XVI

SOCIAL AGENCIES AS SOURCES

ITH some of us the team sense, which is the psychological basis of co-operation in social work, never extends beyond a rather mechanical and listless "belonging"; with others it develops and attunes every faculty. The team, according to Joseph Lee, "is created by assuming that it exists and acting boldly out from that assumption. It grows as its members have power to imagine it and faith to maintain, and act upon, the reality of that which they have imagined." All co-operation is primarily an act of faith. It implies vision, trust, and a common goal.

Though this theme is an inspiring one, which invites digression, its consideration here must be confined to its relation to social diagnosis.

The writer was at one time chairman of an informal committee of charity organization workers which attempted to give advice by correspondence to colleagues in widely scattered communities. One such fellow worker, who had just become executive secretary of a society long established but with a none too prosperous past, wrote for suggestions about co-operation and added, "The investigations made by this society are very good indeed, but there is no co-operation whatever among the social agencies of the community." As gently as possible, an attempt was made to discover the diagnostic habits of this organization, which had so completely failed to establish relations with its social environment. Inquiries were fruitless. The reply came back that their investigations were "all right," and that what was wanted was light on an entirely different subject.

Case work co-operation of some sort is possible, perhaps, with1 Lee, Joseph: Play in Education, p. 339. New York, The Macmillan Co., 1915.

out intelligent diagnosis, and a very poor sort of diagnosis is possible without the co-operation of case workers in other social agencies, but, wherever the processes of co-operation and of investigation have progressed far enough to have genuine social betterment for their aim, they might almost be described as one piece of goods. In its relations with client, client's family, and outside sources, diagnosis with a social aim is a fine exercise in working together. Gross is quoted at the beginning of this book as saying, "The trained man understands how little the mind of an individual can grasp, and how many must co-operate in order to explain the very simplest things." Working together in order to understand and achieve is always a more fruitful process than co-operating in order to co-operate.

There seem to have been in this country four stages of development from competition to co-operation in social work. Needless to add, all four of these stages exist today-just as the phrenologists still exist (and prosper apparently) in the very communities that have given to the world some of the important discoveries of experimental psychology.

(1) The first or competitive stage was chaos. Some of the charitable conditions of that earlier time actually created a demand for child inmates among certain groups of institutions, and stout objection to any reform that "cut down their figures" extended to many charities besides those for children. The absence of common understandings, of any unwritten code governing the behavior of social practitioners to one another, was another ugly characteristic of this competitive period in social case work.

(2) The earliest approaches to social co-operation were like the earliest approaches to social diagnosis-they were made in vacuo. The competitive period was succeeded by a series of extremely awkward attempts-most of them unrelated-to replace competition by co-operation. As a result of this awkwardness, the latter word came to have some unpleasant associations. Miss Birtwell has noted that at this stage our facts were gathered together, then our plans were made, and later the investigating agency appealed for co-operation "wherever there was promise of support for those particular plans. We took to heart," she adds, “the mild ' In one of the short, unpublished papers referred to in the Preface.

reproach of a Catholic priest, who once said to one of our young workers: 'You make your investigation and form your plans, and then assign me a part in them; but I want to come in at the very beginning, where my people are concerned."" The method thus complained of was characteristic of the period of co-operation in vacuo.

(3) Further attempts to conquer chaos were by a routine division of cases on the basis of territory, of nature of need, etc. Here belong also the beginnings of any systematic interchange of information through registration bureaus, confidential exchanges, or social service exchanges, as they have been called at various times and in various places. These emphasized the avoidance of duplication, at first, but now regard elimination of waste as a by-product of more constructive gains. Some of the agreements and reforms of this period have led to excellent results, and co-operative development would have been impossible without them, but traces of their inauguration as found in the case records of organizations that made the mistake of leaning too heavily upon the new devices suggest that all such arrangements have their dangers. Through unimaginative or selfish use, they may develop the characteristics of those agreements in the business world which ignore the interests of the consumer-with us the client. The social diagnostician must, of course, consider his relations with his client as of even greater importance than his relations with the social agencies of his community. To accept every statement of a social agency at its face value, to regard every professional opinion as equal in specific gravity to every other, may be a convenience when the confidential exchange first becomes available; this acquiescence may save trouble to the consultant and to the agency consulted, but the assumption can do the social case worker's clients grave injustice nevertheless.

Just after "joint traffic agreements" among social agencies have become popular in a community, one may expect to find in its case records the conclusions of co-operating agencies accepted without any of the data upon which they are based, may expect to see recorded many duplicate descriptions of the present situation of clients, and may observe the gossip and guesses of workers with 1 Described p. 303 sq.

differing standards promoted to the dignity of "an investigation." All of this is part of the price of progress, probably, but no time should be lost in progressing beyond it. It is distressing to find unfavorable data overemphasized. Perhaps records of arrest and imprisonment were not open to the social agencies previously; when they became accessible through the exchange it was easy at first to put too much emphasis upon the mere fact of a previous arrest, without seeking the details that would have explained its possibly accidental nature. Or perhaps a previous application for relief had come to light automatically under a new plan of interchange between agencies, though the client had denied having made any previous application for help. Is he a fraud? Not necessarily. Many harmless men and women might be given a bad name in this fashion, or, to take the opposite possibility, a client's record might bristle with respectable social authorities and endorsers, yet contain few facts and fewer insights. What is needed-and this need, be it remembered, cannot be well met without complete interchange of information among agencies-is a sense of the main drift of a client's life, a summing up at some one stage, preferably an early one in each case, of the assets and liabilities in character and environment with which social agencies have to deal if they would win their way to a helpful result. Variations in points of view, provided that each is based upon a real experience, help us to think. We are most helped, in fact, by the experience of the agency least like our own, but the right of each to compare its experience with other experiences and to reason about it should not be abrogated. When it is, we encounter the chief danger of the period of joint traffic agreements.

(4) These frankly stated drawbacks are no argument, however, for a return to chaos. They urge us, rather, to push on toward the logical next step in co-operation-toward the kind of honestly evaluated sharing, toward the increased social responsibility, which not only avoids mischievous interference with the client's best interests, but can be of inestimable value in furthering them.

Devices have their place in such a development; understandings of a formal sort have their place. At one stage it may be necessary to have a more or less arbitrary division of work. For example, it may be wise to have an agreement between the charity

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