How Social Workers Can Effect Change in Rural Communities Essay

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Rural Social Service Disparities and Creative Social Work Solutions for Rural Families Across the Life Span." It is found in the Journal of Family Social Work, volume 16, issue 1 from the year 2013 and is written by Melinda Lewis, Diane Scott and Carol Calfee.

This article examines the role that social services performs in rural regions and why its role in these areas has been "historically" something of a challenge for social workers (Lewis, Scott, Calfee, 2013, p. 101). A number of factors present themselves as barriers to social workers attempting to reach individuals or families in rural communities: some of these barriers are multicultural, religious, social, economic, and even political. Each of them represents itself as a bias towards outsiders, such as social workers, who appear to have a foreign agenda. This lack of understanding of what the social worker is about is a cause of fear, alarm and suspicion, and thus the social worker in a rural region has no foothold with which to engage the local communities in order to show his or her good intentions.

The authors do not lay the blame for these barriers at the feet of the rural community members. On the contrary, the article notes the strengths of the rural regions and identifies the fact that these regions are often strong and resilient, which is a good thing for social workers, because it shows that there is something vital and informational that the social worker can use to gain that elusive foothold.

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The solution to overcoming the barriers is found in a creative process in which the social worker develops "collaborative partnerships" with other agencies within the community. In this manner, the social worker can lose the outsider status and become more welcomed into the community. These partnerships can be formed with churches in the rural region, with schools, or with individual leaders within the community. The focus of the partnership can be to do something positive for the community, like take care of the homeless or provide a better delivery service for rural community members throughout the region. Developing such partnerships is important for the rural social worker because it shows that he or she is not just someone looking to foist outside views which may be "tainted" by "other" politics, economic factors, or religious/social differences. It shows that the worker is "one with" the community and its belief and social systems.

What I learned from this article is the value of adapting to meet the needs of the people and communities that you are trying to help. For example, in rural settings, the needs can be different from those in urban settings, just based on the type of community mentality. Rural communities, for example, may be distrustful of a social worker because its own family structure and system….....

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