32 ● Anita Gibbs and Kate van Heugten
along with Connolly and Healy (2013) and Sanders and Munford (2010),
have discussed the main tenets of strengths and solution-focused frameworks:
● (^) Everyone has strengths and resources and the potential for resilient
responses to adverse life events, and each person is the expert on his or
her own lived experience.
● (^) People are capable of deciding what might be the solutions to the
adverse life events they are experiencing, and they are to be invited to
be the authority on what changes they might like to see and how those
changes should come about.
● (^) Human service professionals should view clients positively and work
collaboratively with them to help clients maintain control over their
lives and to help build clients’ internal and external resources.
These three frameworks—narrative, strengths, and solution-focused—
provide a nonblaming way of explaining people’s challenges and enable a
positive and resilience-oriented focus for intervention. They allow for story-
telling of lived experience and for people to develop a capacity and strength
to solve problems as they see fit. The main limitation of these approaches
is that they are usually applied to achieve individual and family improve-
ment and are seldom used to attempt to transform and challenge structural
inequalities (Gray 2011). Gray (2011) cautioned those who support such
frameworks to challenge the neoliberal capture of the strengths approach and
to instead adopt a more philosophical understanding of strengths as bringing
social justice and liberation to whole communities and not just individuals.
If we apply these frameworks to Aleena’s situation, a human service pro-
fessional would facilitate Aleena speaking her own narrative about her life,
with an aim to encourage and validate her story. The worker might help chal-
lenge and deconstruct Aleena’s story if it is destructive of her well-being and
might encourage her to reauthor aspects of the story (Connolly and Healy
2013). The worker would work with Aleena to identify her skills, relation-
ship strengths, and other resources and assist her in taking a self-determining
pathway to achieve new competencies and success. The worker would hold
Aleena in high positive regard and work collaboratively with her to help
Aleena solve her own problems and to build up Aleena’s internal and external
strengths and resources. The worker might also help Aleena access resources
from others to improve her social, educational, and living conditions.
Ecosystems Frameworks
Social work has combined theory from ecological approaches and systems
theory to develop frameworks focused on understanding and helping people