"You have to love it": What does it take to work in remote community services?

An output of a partnership between Uniting Country SA (UCSA) and the Centre for Social Impact at Flinders University. For community and social service workers, practising in rural, regional and remote (RRR) areas presents distinctive challenges and requires a different set of skills from urban practice such as sparse populations, higher levels of disadvantage, higher proportions of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, longer distances, fewer transport options, and poorer telecommunication access than urban communities. This report presents findings from a mixed method rapid ethnographic study investigating the specialist knowledge and skills that are required for working in regional and remote community service programs. Our findings align with the evidence that the main areas of distinctive regional and remote practice include: the ability to collaborate and build relationships; the acquisition of specialist-generalist skills, and; personal skills such as creativity, lateral thinking and resilience. These practices and characteristics of workers are powerful in mitigating the structural inequities that are most stark in regional and remote contexts. Further, developing an explicitly decolonising agenda across and between RRR-servicing organisations would benefit both Aboriginal and non-Aboriginal workers and the communities in which they live and work.