Intervention aimed at the development of social support networks provides a means for preventing some of the physical, emotional, and social problems of both long-term and transient rural residents. Individuals living in rural and remote communities face several contextual problems, including distance, personal and professional isolation, unique social/economic/political environmental pressures, sporadic and limited resources. Rural social workers can engage in a variety of activities to optimize the quality and sufficiency of support that people receive from informal caregivers in the community and from their primary social contacts. This paper presents a social networks and social support framework for use by rural social work practitioners in the remediation and prevention of emotional and social problems generated by rurality's contextual factors. The framework is then applied to a rural remote community case situation, Churchill, Manitoba, and its application to both local and transient groups of people is examined. The paper closes with a discussion of common elements of the interventive frameworks: increasing individual and social support resources and/or building new linkages while abandoning problematic old linkages. (BRR)