Crossing Boundaries and Developing Alliances Through Group Work

Knock down cultural walls to build a foundation for successful social group work!

Crossing Boundaries and Developing Alliances Through Group Work examines how changing technological, economic, and social conditions require social workers to create alliances to better serve their clients. The book addresses how the basic principles and techniques of group work can transcend geographical and cultural boundaries when dealing with issues such as HIV/AIDS, parenting, adoption, and sex offenses. A distinguished panel of practitioners, researchers, and educators details the strategies used to establish cultural and linguistic border crossings that help reduce the limits social workers face.

Crossing Boundaries and Developing Alliances Through Group Work addresses the multicultural dimension of social work and the benefits of a junction between research and intervention, including how the convergence with other fields of knowledge (music, drama, the arts, etc.) can contribute to a more effective intervention methodology. The book examines partnerships between research teams and agencies, field placements, collaborations between schools and practice settings, building a learning community, service education, the arrival of new technologies (teleconferencing, the Internet), reasserting group work fundamentals, and how mixing and matching methodologies can produce a more effective intervention strategy.

Topics examined in Crossing Boundaries and Developing Alliances Through Group Work include:

• working with AIDS patients in early recovery from substance abuse
• integrating group work with mutual aid to treat male sex offenders
• using teleconferencing groups with families involved in organ donation
• conducting group interventions with mentally ill parents
• working with families dealing with failed adoptions
• developing a mediating group for birth parent self-assessment
• and much more!

Crossing Boundaries and Developing Alliances Through Group Work is an essential tool for dealing with cross-cultural conflicts. It's equally valuable as a professional guide for clinicians and therapists, policy developers, supervisors, and administrators, and as a textbook or supplemental text in courses dealing with clinical, international, and intercultural group work, advanced group work, support groups, and mental health services.

Jocelyn Lindsay, Daniel Turcotte, Estelle Hopmeyer