Abstract

Outreach social work entails actively seeking users, giving space to express complex needs and offer personalized services to circumvent severe access barriers. Digital resources during the pandemic have offered outreach workers the possibility to enlarge and accelerate their reach towards severely marginalized groups who experienced difficulties to reach mainstream social services. This study explores the potential of digitalisation in low threshold contexts, drawing from emerging literature on digital social work, and empirically based on interviews with 22 outreach social workers engaged in low-threshold contexts in Northern Italy. The qualitative analysis regards three main aspects: potential of the integration of digital tools in outreach social work, the impact of digital means on relational contexts between social workers and the users, and the ethical aspects that are being redefined by digital technologies.