What makes small beautiful?
What are the qualities of rural social work? How can one make such qualities seen and valued? And how can rural social work develop to become even better for the communities they serve? These are questions we are working on in the project “Better services in small municipalities” in Nordland county in Northern Norway. The project started by spring 2003, and will run until summer 2005.
In this county there are 45 municipalities. About 30 of them have fewer than 3000 inhabitants. In these small municipalities we often find one or two professionals working with the social welfare and childcare. Sometimes the municipality have no professionals at all.
The project have been working along two lines. One of them is research, performed by Nordland Research Institute focusing on two approaches. The first is to get more knowledge about what importance cooperation between the small municipalities has for social work in small municipalities in general and in child welfare in special. The second is to try to get more knowledge about the foundation for knowledge in social work in small municipalities. The other line is to create a “triangle” in competence development between the professionals in the communities, the County governor in Nordland and Bodoe Regional University, based on network development through projects for new practice, supervision and courses.
The paper presents some findings from our research, and experiences from our efforts on professional development. It discusses different forms of network, and their effect on social work in these communities. And it discusses models of organising professional development that include that university and an organisation like the Govenor take part in local processes in this field. Our findings and experiences show that rural social work has important qualities that one should develop, and that some forms of network can compensate for some of the problems that social workers in rural communities experience.