Dear Social Work Students,

My name is Peter Jones and I work in the School of Social Work and Comunity Welfare at James Cook
University in Australia. I am writing today to see if you might be interested in assisting with a project which I am developing with some of our final year social work students here at JCU.

In the final year of our BSW program, we have a subject called Social Work in a Global Environment which (amongst other things) encourages students to begin to develop a more internationalist approach to practice and a greater awareness of the nature of social work in other countries. As part of this process we have in past years encouraged students to make contact via email with practitioners and students in other countries,to exchange information, views etc.

I thought that our students would benefit greatly from being able to engage with some of the social work students using this web site, and to gain an understanding of what social work is like in your country and practice context.

In the past, the way in which the contact has been managed is that students who would like to
participate pass their email address and a brief introduction to me (at Peter.Jones1@jcu.edu.au) and I match them up with a student here at JCU, who would then initiate contact. Past participants have reported finding the experience mutually rewarding and that the time commitment was certainly not onerous on their part (often just one email per week across the semester ie thirteen weeks).

I look forward to hearing back from some of you and thank you in advance for your time and consideration.

Sincerely,

Peter Jones