Cultural Humility
Overview
Regardless of the program setting, organizations must strive to offer culturally-sensitive services to the service recipients. With an ever-changing demographic of clients, building cultural humility among staff has to be a deliberate and planned goal. This training focuses on skill-building in four competencies: ethics and values, self-awareness, service delivery, and language diversity. In addition to providing services to diverse service recipients, most programs are also staffed by a broad range of individuals, each with unique communication styles and values. The quality of services offered often depends on the degree to which effective communication occurs amongst all levels of staff, as certain critical sentiments can get lost in translation when staff members cannot effectively exchange points of view. In this training, experiential exercises will be used to illustrate the concept of culturally-bound frames of reference and how to use awareness of these frames to heighten cultural sensitivity. At the end of this training, attendees will be better equipped to offer culturally-sensitive services and to effectively communicate points of view.Â
Learning objectives
- Define cultural humility
- Compose programmatic considerations to ensure cultural humility is addressed
- Explain why cultural humility is a process that is never fully realized
- Recognize the characteristics of a dominant system and how they relate to power and privilege
- Describe how culturally-bound frames of reference can impact mental health providers’ assumptions about and perspectives of clients