Swedish social services rest on strong institutional legitimacy, yet levels of trust in the organization and its professionals vary across different groups. Outreach social work targeting young people aims, in the spirit of prevention, to actively seek out and engage those who would not otherwise encounter social services –”the hard to reach”. While previous research has largely examined how low trust affects service users and those under investigation, far less attention has been paid to legitimacy–an issue that is crucial in outreach work, where social workers initiate contact. Because young people may view such approaches as intrusive or illegitimate, outreach workers must negotiate situational legitimacy to gain recognition and acceptance. This study draws on participant observations and interviews with outreach workers, young people, and unit managers to analyse the conditions that shape these legitimacy-building processes and how they are managed in practice. The findings show that outreach workers navigate multiple audiences: a primary audience–the youth themselves–and a secondary audience consisting of collaboration partners, policymakers, and other actors present in public settings. Another finding highlights how outreach workers negotiate contextually, shaped by time and place, seeking acceptance that grants them the mandate to pursue broader preventive goal, a process conceptualized in terms of situational legitimacy. 

Outreach social work targeting young people has been conducted in Sweden since the 1950s, but its extent has varied significantly depending on the prevailing social policy ideas. Today, we observe a strong expansion, partly motivated by the need to develop preventive strategies against recruitment into gang criminality. The fundamental idea of outreach work is to reach individuals who do not themselves seek the support of social services through contact establishment and motivational work. However, it is not always clear which individuals or in which situations the detached practitioners have the legitimacy to approach the youth they wish to engage. Several factors influence how outreach workers seek out and establish contact with the target group. In this study, participant observations was used to understand what fieldwork entails in practice concerning the outreach and contact-establishing dimensions. It emerges that the location, time, and signals given by the youth themselves indicate how outreach practitioners should seek contact, and with whom. The overarching idea seems to be to establish "good meetings", which means that interactions with the youth proceed smoothly and that a meeting can be an investment that facilitates future contact attempts. This idea results in outreach workers striving to avoid confrontations and to be accepted as adults in an arena where young people are perceived to have significant influence over who is allowed in. The study highlights that the accessibility and receptivity of youth to interactions appear greater when they are in environments with already present adult supervision or control, such as youth centers or sports activities. It seems more challenging