Introduction

This chapter shows the active role of social workers in trying to turn a passive public programme of public social assistance into an effective social policy. In the familistic Spanish welfare context (Flaquer, 2004), these professionals alleviate the desperation and deprivation of the newly poor through a normative, cognitive and emotional approach that helps them to adapt to their new circumstances. The crisis impacted mostly the population that tends to depend on wages, such as families with children. In Spain, the rate of severe material deprivation increased from 5.5% in 2008 to 8.3% in 2013, and the at-risk-of-poverty gap rose from 26.2% to 35.4% (Social Protection Committee, 2015). A considerable share of middle-income families with children were also hit by the recession: 22.5% of households with children that were in 2008 in the fourth, fifth and sixth income percentiles had already plummeted to the first and second percentile in 2011 (Marí-Klose & Martínez, 2016). On the other hand, family networks, which palliated some of the most exclusionary effects of the crisis, were showing some signs of saturation (Marí-Klose, 2016). In turn, the public social protection system became more residual because of cuts in public social assistance, and the responsibility of being in charge of the most vulnerable population was transferred to non-governmental organisations (NGOs) (Lorenzo, 2014). In this context, NGO agencies went through a process of internal restructuration, networking, searching for new funding and implementing new strategies for lobbying, which led to an extension of the charity sector (Fresno, 2015).

The lack of comprehensive anti-poverty policies at the national and regional level leaves the highly residual local social assistance system as the main response of the state to the rise and diversification of social needs. Yet the resources of this system seem insufficient to help the newly poor clients, a sector of the population that has seen their social world fall apart and who are now feeling powerless. Yet in between the state and the newly poor clients are the social workers who directly bring the policy to the newly poor. Working in a constraining context, those practitioners are nonetheless a highly skilled and vocational workforce that can reframe people's lives.