Introduction

Critical social policy and social work studies regularly offer critiques on mainstream welfare systems, institutions and attitudes. But these approaches often leave little space for discussion about what alternative social work and welfare might look like. In the history of social work internationally there have been examples of collective and grassroots alternatives – forms of popular social work. In most cases, however, these have been written out of history and excluded from dominant definitions of social work.

The focus of this chapter is on a specific period of modern Greek history when an organic and democratic welfare network developed as part of a broader movement for liberation and social change. I explore the legacy, influence and vision of this welfare movement, which flourished in Greece during the politically and socially turbulent 1940s. I argue that this experience can inform modern social work practices and demonstrate that alternative social welfare models are not only desirable but possible.

In exploring the welfare and social work developments of this period there are two main points that need to be clarified. The first is related to the use of the term ‘social work’ and the second concerns the boundaries of social welfare during a period of military occupation and popular resistance.

My definition of social work is not restricted to the increasingly narrow perspectives of Anglo-American social work that dominate the literature of international social work. I suggest that social work as an activity can be much wider and organic than those activities shaped by ‘professional’ and ‘legal’ boundaries in the Anglo-American world. Definitions of social work need to embrace various local traditions, collective and democratic processes and grassroots creativity. In Greece the history of social work is split between the emergence of ‘official’ social work in 1946, which was imported by the Americans as part of a multi-dimensional (military, political, cultural and social) intervention into the country during and after the civil war, and the ‘popular’ social work that flourished out of grassroots welfare activities and networks that developed as part of the popular liberation movement first against the Nazi occupation and then within the context of the civil war. The experience of these networks and activities highlighted one of the most creative and inclusive welfare systems in modern Greek history, yet it has been systematically suppressed and ignored within official social work literature.