Social Workers Analyze Rural Social Work Abroad

As early as the beginning of the 20th century, the United States was in the "Progressive Era" and the "New Deal" period, with the American society at that time concerned about the plight of unemployed farmers as well as other farmers, the government adopted a variety of policy initiatives to deal with the rural crisis and rural problems, the social workers have played a very active role at all levels. Social workers played an active role at various levels. They utilized their professional knowledge and techniques to carry out various service actions, giving full play to the function of social work in helping farmers' groups to improve their situation, solving social problems in rural areas, and promoting a more coordinated development of urban and rural areas. At that time, some social workers in the United States either served as officials of the relevant government departments, using the unique perspective and technical skills of social work in social administration concerning rural areas and farmers, so as to make all kinds of social policies and measures targeting farmers and rural societies more effective; or carried out all kinds of rural community work programs under the support of the government, and implemented rural community work programs that included comprehensive community development or community building. Or, with the support of the government, they carry out various rural community work projects and implement rural community work programs with comprehensive community development or community building content; or, they independently carry out some rural social work attempts targeting farmers, aiming to concretely improve the plight of farmers and their families, and to verify the validity of the knowledge, especially the methods, of social work. It can be said that these constituted the early forms of rural social work and provided the basic direction for the subsequent development of rural social work. In some contemporary developing countries and regions, rural social work has also gained continued development, and social work continues to play an active role in the rural sphere, even more prominently. There are two main scenarios: first, the exploration and practice of rural social work in some developing countries and regions, which often display distinctive cultural characteristics; and second, the practice in some development projects linked to the development assistance activities of developed countries, which is designed to involve social work or a certain role and application of social work knowledge and techniques, and which contains certain elements of the new rural social work. With regard to the former, Asia, Africa, Latin America and other third world countries have local rural social work practice exploration, to a considerable extent can be said to have formed their own unique focus on rural and peasant social work tradition. This tradition is mainly reflected in the emphasis on the community-based approach and the social action approach, which is distinctly different from both the individualism and functionalism represented by the United Kingdom and the United States, as well as the structural orientation and revolutionary model of the socialist countries, which emphasizes the arrangement of the collective welfare system. As for the rural social work models associated with various rural development projects, they are summarized as follows: participatory development, capacity-building, empowerment, cultural preservation, ecological preservation, and so on. It should be said that the specific objectives of various rural development projects and the theories on which they are based and their models are very different, and there are differences in their use of social work.