ORIGINAL PAPER One Person Can Make a Difference: Stories of Strong Communities and Their Outreach Workers Jill D. McLeigh, et al. [full author details at the end of the article] # Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2020 Abstract Building on the conclusion of the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect (1993) that child protection should be a part of everyday life, Strong Communities for Children is a neighborhood-based strategy designed to keep children safe by mobilizing communities to enable informal support for the children’s parents. This article describes the role of the outreach workers who were responsible for engaging communities in dialog, action, mutual assistance, and resource provision geared toward family support. Indeed, despite research suggesting that outreach plays a critical role in prevention efforts, little is known about the nature and process of outreach workers’ activities. To address this gap, this article provides a sense of how Strong Communities employed an outreach strategy, who the outreach workers were, how they were prepared, and how https://doi.org/10.1007/s42448-020-00047-5 All of the authors were employed at Clemson University at the time that Strong Communities for Children was implemented in several communities in northwestern South Carolina, and all were engaged in work on the initiative as part of their responsibilities at Clemson. Doris Cole, a co-author of this article (“Outreach Worker 1”), died in March 2010. As a research faculty member, Cole worked with the Institute on Family and Neighborhood Life at Clemson University on the Strong Communities initiative from 2005 to 2009. A doctoral-level teacher and administrator in the mill-town district where she herself attended school (Anderson County, SC, School District 1), Cole was respected for her dedication to the community in which she lived and worked and for her passion for children. For her exceptional work in Strong Communities, Cole was honored by the South Carolina Department of Commerce as Rural Educator of the Year and by the South Carolina Professional Society on Abuse of Children as Professional of the Year. This article is dedicated to Cole in the hope that her work will be replicated and that children will indeed be safer thanks to the efforts of caring communities. For a decade beginning soon after the grant supporting the Strong Communities initiative ended, Paulette Grate (“Outreach Worker 2”) has continued to apply her experiences in Strong Communities through service as a member of the school board in the district in which she lives. This article describes the process of community mobilization in the initial implementation of the Strong Communities model, which was the first comprehensive operationalization of the national strategy for child protection that was proposed by the U.S. Advisory Board on Child Abuse and Neglect (1993). Hence, past tense is used in most of this article, in order to describe the work by outreach workers in Strong Communities in South Carolina from 2002 to 2008. However, Strong Communities remains a cutting-edge approach that can be adapted for use in other communities and indeed other cultures, as discussed briefly in this article in relation to Strong Communities Israel, which has relied on social work students in combination with community volunteers and community social workers to perform the outreach function (see, e.g., Katz et al., 2019; McLeigh et al., 2017). Gary B. Melton was the principal investigator in the South Carolina initiative. Robin J. Kimbrough-Melton served as outreach coordinator and associate director of the initiative. International Journal on Child Maltreatment: Research, Policy and Practice (2020) 3:177–196 Published online: 26 May 2020