The beginning of the blog, bear with me.

Welcome to the Thinking Outreach blog.

This blog is a counterpart to the Assertive Engagement Resource, a website resource dedicated to the skills employed by outreach workers, drug workers, prison workers and any other worker whose client group is often termed 'Hard to reach'.

There you can find weblinks, book reviews, listings and formal articles, here I aim talk about good practice in outreach in a much less formal sense. The idea is to use this blog to share ideas and observations well before they get honed into something that can be presented as an article, a good practice guideline or a presentation.

There are three core drivers to the aim of this blog:

1. I believe that the good practices of the workers I work alongside in a range of fields are too infrequently recorded, analysed and disseminated and yet by doing just this we can begin to build up a picture of what works and what doesn't in fields of working that sometimes are no more than only a few years old (my own field of Anti-Social Behaviour is so new expertise is very hard to come across).

2. The thoughtful application psychotherapeutic techniques, along with learning from social and cognitive psychology, can enhance our engagement with vulnerable and disenfranchised groups enormously and yet these techniques, and this learning, are often seen solely as the dominion of psychologists and counsellors who actually need work much less hard than outreach workers (and require fewer techniques) to secure meaningful outcomes. This blog (and the Assertive Engagement Resource) is an attempt to redress this balance slightly by trying to draw lessons from the ways that a client's responses to a worker's attempt at intervention can often be unpicked and understood through the same processes that more formally recognised workers use to analyse their practice.

3. A part of this blog will just be a cheeky polemic on subjects close to my heart such as homelessness and substance misuse. Mostly this will just be my opportunity to vent but more charitably you could look at these entries as being, at least in part, representative of the kinds of conversations that professionals in these fields are having, and the kinds of views we hold. I do not think that there is often a close attention paid to the views of workers who work on the front line of service provision - certainly we are under-represented in the media.

So welcome, I hope that some small part of this blog proves useful to you. And if not, at least interesting.