Single parents, 90 percent of whom are women, face particularly difficult challenges. Often, they carry the responsibility for upbringing, offering care, and generating an income all on their own. Despite higher financial needs, they have very little money at their disposal due to part-time work and no, low, or irregular child and/or spousal support – even though they usually work 24/7.

For years and decades, they have hardly any time left for self-care. The COVID-19 pandemic has seen the situation of single parents deteriorating further with a poverty risk that is already higher than the societal average.

The “single parent“ is often instrumentalized in the socio-political discourse. In stark contrast, public funding for implementing governmental social support offers such as expanding comprehensive childcare or ensuring child allowances by the government is lacking. Due to an insufficient support system, those affected are often left to their own devices in emergency situations. Some single parents resort to self-organised and Social Work support as a coping strategy.

This bachelor project explores self-organised single parent initiatives and social support offers for single parents from a bottom-up or user research perspective (cf. Bareis 2012) and looks for answers to questions about the work and resources users need to be able to benefit from self-organisation and support offers. Due to its ethical principles (cf. IFSW 2014), Social Work campaigns for social justice, human rights, and social change.

Against this background, this bachelor project examines how single parents use self-organisation to counteract social exclusion processes and non-representation (cf. Bareis 2012) and determines the supportive role that Social Work can play in this process. The students will approach the topic through research methods of social sciences and literature research.