Supporting Social Work with Families and Children in Rural Areas

On October 1, 2003, the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services awarded the Resource Program, which is part of the Jordan Institute for Families at the UNC-Chapel Hill School of Social Work, a five-year grant to develop training to enhance the effectiveness of child welfare workers and supervisors who serve rural communities.

This project will enhance the capacity of child welfare workers to serve families in rural communities through a three-part intervention comprised of:

• A multi-module, competency-based training course for rural child welfare supervisors and line workers
  
  
• A series of agency and community engagement dialogues, and
  
  
• A series of summits for rural child welfare professionals.

This combination of approaches will help social workers develop the knowledge and skills they need to identify and build on the strengths of rural families and communities to achieve child safety, permanence, and well-being.

This project will be conducted in partnership with 14 rural North Carolina counties:

• Seven from the Southern Highlands of the Appalachian mountains (Cherokee, Clay, Graham, Haywood, Jackson, Macon, and Swain Counties), and
• Seven from northeastern North Carolina (Bertie, Gates, Halifax, Hertford, Northampton, Pasquotank, and Warren Counties).

Despite their unique histories and cultures, the challenges facing these counties are similar to those faced in most rural areas—especially those in the mountains and the coastal plains of the southeastern United States.

Working with these specific North Carolina counties will enable this project to create educational products and strategies that will be useful to rural child welfare practitioners in the Southeast and across the country.

Project objectives include:

1. Identifying and capturing success stories from child welfare practitioners and the rural families they serve for use in curriculum development and community outreach efforts;
2. Developing a training curriculum for rural child welfare supervisors and line workers;
3. Conducting specialized cross-training for child welfare agencies and their community partners;
4. Using community engagement dialogues and state and rural child welfare summits to galvanize rural communities around the tasks of achieving child safety, permanence, and well-being;
5. Evaluating and disseminating project findings and lessons learned to leading child welfare and social work journals.
   

The client outcomes that will be used to assess this project include child safety, child permanence, and well-being. Project activities will be conducted in child welfare agencies (and their communities) in North Carolina.

Project products include a multi-module curriculum, tools for conducting agency and community engagement dialogues, a guide for helping States develop rural child welfare outreach strategies, proceedings from state and national summits, annual evaluation reports, and related articles and publications. These products will be made available throughout the state and disseminated nationally.

Additional information about the grant can be obtained through the Children's Bureau website at: http://www.acf.hhs.gov/programs/cb/funding/fy2003ga.htm (see Grant 2003C.2, "Training for Effective Child Welfare Practice in Rural Communities"). You can also learn more by contacting the Family and Children's Resource Program at http://sswnt7.sowo.unc.edu/fcrp/contact_us.htm/