In 1972 the Melbourne welfare agency, the Brotherhood of St Laurence, wound up the social programme it had offered, with what it felt had been limited success, for the previous forty years, to launch a daring experiment. Aiming to help poor people lift themselves out of their poverty and regain their independence in the community at large, this radical new approach attacked the poverty of sixty ‘multi-deficit’ families on all fronts by involving their participation in their own progress, made possible by a period of income stability.

Michael Liffman had worked as researcher for 5 years with the Brotherhood of St Laurence, the first three as principal research worker with the Family Centre Project. In this book, originally published in 1978, he describes the origins, developments and achievements of the Project in its first three years. The account reflects many of the issues current in the field of social welfare and poverty: the distance of theory from practice, the situational/cultural debate within theory and the cash-or-casework dilemma facing practice, the relationship between professional workers and clients, and the many everyday problems faced in devising and implementing anti-poverty programmes.

The traditional attitudes of the professionals, the poor, the public and the policy-makers are rigorously questioned and the conclusions – while they offer no panaceas – open up the possibilities for some new and perhaps more effective approaches to the problem of poverty. The questions raised by the experience of the Family Centre Project are central to the interests of all those concerned with social welfare, whether as academics, workers or students. As David Donnison says in his Foreword, which looks at the Project in the light of an international experience of social welfare, any reader of this book ‘will have to rethink a lot of his assumptions about professions and helping relationships, about leadership… about the giving and receiving of money, …and about social casework, which the project transformed but never abolished.’

Michael Liffman had worked as researcher for 5 years with the Brotherhood of St Laurence, the first three as principal research worker with the Family Centre Project.