Reflecting on rural social work resulting from a practicum with the Gitanmaax Men’s Group at the Gitanmaax Health and Wellness Center

The purpose of this report is to summarize my practicum experience with the Gitanmaax Men’s Group at the Gitanmaax Health and Wellness Centre in Gitanmaax Village, BC. The agency serves Gitanmaax membership living within the community of Gitanmaax village as well as those living off-reserve in the surrounding area. This report outlines the learning goals of my practicum and how those objectives were met through reflection, supervision, mentorship, and practice. Unforeseen learning came as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and the impact it was having on the Gitxsan nation and on the transfer of cultural knowledge to the younger generation. Along with strengthening my social work skills, my practicum allowed me to explore rural ethics in social work and how these connect to practice. This account of what emerged from my practicum learning concludes with suggestions around ethics, self-care, service delivery, and one’s role as a non–First Nations person working in a First Nations community.

Rural Social Work on the US–Mexico Border

The profession of social work continues to struggle with the provision of services that must be culturally sensitive to the values and traditions of the people who live in rural neighborhoods and colonias along the U.S.–Mexico border. The diverse populations that live in the border environment are self-reliant and distrust outsiders. This most salient fact creates opportunities for social work programs to adopt the person-in-the-environment approach to assessment. In so doing, the gente (people) in need of services are more apt to feel respected and will facilitate access to their families and communities. The rurality paradigm was developed to provide an understanding of the underlying ideologies of the community first and foremost. Rurality views people’s self-image as constructed by their interactions with each other and the environment. Social work practice in rural areas continues to be at the forefront of both educational and professional concerns. A paradigm shift is advocated to capture the “rurality”- defined lifestyle found along the U.S.–Mexico border of South Texas. This approach provides a more in-depth view of the social interactions necessary for competent, culturally sensitive social work practice.

Path Analysis of Rural Social Work Intervention in Precision Poverty Alleviation in Sichuan Province

The targeted poverty alleviation policy is one of the important methods to solve the problem of poverty in China. After the implementation of the targeted poverty alleviation policy in China, some results have shown positive. However, due to the shortage of resources and talents for poverty alleviation, there are still some shortcomings in the targeted poverty alleviation work. In the process of targeted poverty alleviation, if we can promote social work to participate in targeted poverty alleviation and use a wider range of social forces to provide more professional and targeted assistance work for the poor, we will achieve the final sprint for the success of targeted poverty alleviation in China and a well-off society. Based on the actual situation of China's current targeted poverty alleviation work, this article takes the relationship and content of rural social work in Sichuan Province as part of the targeted poverty alleviation as well as the difficulties it faces. The analysis focuses on the path of rural social work in Sichuan Province to targeted poverty alleviation and aims to provide more reference suggestions for targeted poverty alleviation in China.

Rural Social Work in China

In this article, “China” refers to “mainland China.” Social work as academic discipline was first introduced to China’s most important universities, such as Yenching University, in the 1920s. However, social work, like other social science disciplines, was labeled as “bourgeois pseudo-science” and removed from Chinese universities in the 1950s, based on the idea that there were no social problems in socialist China, and thus no need for social work education. After the introduction of the Open Door and Economic Reform policy in 1978, social science disciplines were gradually reestablished in universities in mainland China beginning in the late 1980s, after a lapse of over thirty years. China’s rapid social and economic transformation has created different social problems since the late 1970s. As a measure to alleviate emerging social problems, the return of social work programs was advocated by the Ministry of Civil Affairs and by leading academics, who saw the need to develop professional social workers to handle the increasingly complex social problems arising from rapid social and economic transitions. Thus, the Chinese government reintroduced social work education programs to the universities in the late 1980s, for the clear political mission of establishing social stability and a harmonious society. Peking University was the first higher educational institute to launch a social work program at both the undergraduate and postgraduate levels in 1988. Gradually, other universities and cadre training colleges in China followed its lead. In China in 2018, there were 348 undergraduate social work programs and 150 master’s of social work (MSW) programs. In China’s specific context, rural social work is one of the major subfields of social work. As social work was developed in the Western urban context, when it was reintroduced to China, some of the Chinese social work educators were aware of the differences in cultural and societal context between China and the West. They emphasized the indigenization of social work in China, and rural social work was regarded as the major component of this effort. They also thought social development and poverty alleviation should be a major factor. For example, Professor Wang Sibin, a leading social work scholar from Peking University, opined that social development and poverty alleviation should be the primary focus of social work education in China, and that individualized practice should only constitute a supplementary and secondary role in the social work curriculum. This is the context and direction of rural social work development in China since it was reconstructed in the 1980s. However, even today, rural social work is underdeveloped in terms of academic research and publication. Most of the bibliographies are in Chinese, and very few academic papers have been published in English in the area of rural social work in China. Nonetheless, in this bibliography, priority will be given to English academic papers. Only important and high-quality Chinese articles will be cited.

RESPONSES TO ADVERSITY FACED BY FARMING MEN: A GENDER-TRANSFORMATIVE ANALYSIS

The values that characterize the traditional and stereotypical image of rural masculinity put pressure on farming men to engage with risky behaviours, both physical and mental, and reduce their willingness to seek help. This paper investigates individual and social responses to adversity, under the lenses of response-based practice and gender-transformative health promotion. Our method is based on qualitative semi-structured interviews with 32 farming men and 2 focus group interviews with 14 experts on men’s health, farming, and rural social work. Results suggest gender is negotiated through individual and social responses to adversity, with fluid transitions between conformity and resistance with regard to traditional masculinity. Individual responses to adversity can include negative or positive coping strategies. Social responses can be supportive, or they can be marginalizing, such as the devaluation of farming. For farmers facing adversity, there is a disparity in social support, with communal solidarity being evident in a material crisis, but not in a personal one. Some community-based responses are highlighted for their ability to support farming men in coping with adversity.