How Social Workers Can Effect Change in Rural Communities

¶ … 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. 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 is its support and backbone and it does not want anyone coming in and poking around in there, because that is like a threat to its existence.

Even if that existence could be improved through the social worker's help, it is not the social worker's place to come in and start pointing fingers and start showing why things are not working and how they could be better. It is to the social worker's advantage to first win the trust of the local community, whether by going to its church or churches, by participating in its school events, or by meeting its local leaders and forging friendships based in positive activities that benefit the community.

Winning the trust of the community is a great way for social workers to make long-term changes that are effective. It allows the worker to come and organically develop the situation rather than mechanically or artificially apply a kind of social bandage to a wound that is still not healing. By getting inside the community and becoming part of it, the social worker acts like a blood cell moving to heal the would and fight the infection.

Once the worker is part of the body and is accepted by the body, he or she is in a better position to affect real change. I propose that we can change rural populations by following this advice and by embedding ourselves in rural communities. It is not such an easy process as showing up and giving orders and advice. It is more of a drawn-out exercise in which solidarity is created. It is about building relationships.

By building positive relationships, our ideas and messages can be spread and accepted more easily. Relationships are like bridges that help ideas transfer from one side or person to another. Without them, it is much harder transfer.