Rural outreach in community mental health centers involves staff commuting from a central agency to surrounding rural towns to provide clinical and/or community service. The problem for outreach staff is how to best provide services to a rural network that is distant and different from the urban network. In general the greater the distance, the fewer the interconnections between the rural community and the city. The amount of overlap between rural and urban networks affects the outreach worker's role. With fewer connections to the city, rural people depend more on the outreach worker's information about and referral to nonlocal services. Rural communities have distinct social networks characterized by close-knit families and homogeneous populations. Rural individuals expect more personal and informal mental health care and rely more on primary care physicians than do urbanites. Outreach workers must adapt to local procedures, evaluate services in light of the rural clientele, and effectively inform clients about local services. (ABL)