Poverty and unemployment aren't spread evenly across cities or regions, but rather are concentrated in disinvested urban neighborhoods and rural communities around the country. These communities are home to the nation's most vulnerable children and families. Despite some signs of improvement in economic conditions for families in the United…

A manual, geared toward training social workers going into rural areas, provides a brief discussion of the natural helping relationships found in rural communities and a simulation game to be used in acquainting social workers, clients, and students with the rural network. Objectives of the simulation game, Nets and Links, are to train people to…

Over the last 2 decades, the loss of population and businesses in many small, inland, and remote Australian rural communities has intensified, largely because of the stress and uncertainty of volatile world commodity markets. This manual presents a range of survival and revival strategies that some communities have used to build resilient…