Community mutual assistance as an archaic form of social work and the potential for its transformation to support the elderly

The article has a historical and sociological orientation and is devoted to the transformation of forms of communal mutual assistance into today's ways and methods of mutual support between people. The research focuses on helping the elderly as a socially vulnerable category of the population, and this vulnerability and the need for community support were recorded at all stages of society's development. During the existence of peasant communities, caring for the elderly was perceived as a universal social obligation and was expressed in economic, communal, tribal and religious forms of assistance. The methods of supporting an elderly person described in the article - help, outfits, alternate feeding in families, etc. - have been preserved in rural areas for many centuries and were fixed even in the XX century. The key factor in these processes was tradition as a regulator of the system of social relations. However, as urbanization, demographic changes in rural areas, the destruction of the community, and the emergence of specialized support services, the traditions of mutual assistance are becoming a thing of the past, reminding themselves of relatively systematic acts of assistance in rural areas and less systematic, voluntary-oriented ones in the city. There is a phenomenon of neighborhood mutual assistance in an urban environment that is far from widespread and highly localized in small groups, more focused on volunteerism, a sense of moral duty, and at the same time closely related to the emotional nature of the communicative environment and the local destruction of privacy of life.