Facilitating Services to Multicultural Communities in a Dominant Culture Setting:

The Culturally Responsive Social Service Agency: The Application of an Evolving Definition to a Case Study

“…Fong & Gibbs (1995) found that the changes needed to create a culturally responsive organization can threaten the core culture of an agency, foster resistance, and compromise the effectiveness of an ethnically diverse workforce that must conform to preexisting services, rules, and procedures that may not be appropriate for serving diverse communities. Fong & Gibbs (1995, p. 16-18) offer the following recommendations to avoid these negative outcomes at the organizational level: 1) The organization should recognize the impetus for the desire to hire multicultural staff and to clarify desired outcomes (e.g., improvement of service delivery or contract accountability issues); 2) the organization should become proficient in receiving and integrating divergent forms of input from all parts of the community and within the organization itself as it hires and incorporates culturally diverse staff; 3) the agency should strive as a whole to improve diversity; 4) the organization should consider optimal ways to cluster culturally diverse staff to create a critical mass so that they are no longer singled out as tokens in various units; and 5) agency administrators and staff must share a clear understanding about the required level of cultural skills and knowledge necessary to deliver effective services to the target population, to develop community ties, and to recognize the need for bilingual language skills.…”

“…Culturally responsive organizational policies and procedures (adapted from Cross and Friesen, 2005) • organizational mission statement • service standards • personnel management • information systems • community involvement and feedback mechanisms providing ongoing advice • service contracting • intake mechanisms (featuring client strengths and effective referrals with follow-up) • family-provider collaboration IV. Continuous organizational renewal utilizing cultural self-assessments (adapted from Cross and Friesen, 2005) • Defines service population and its demographic characteristics • Ensures staff and board representation in relationship to community characteristics • Creates staffing patterns, job descriptions, performance evaluations, and training programs (including volunteers) that reflect the community's demographics • Utilizes continuously updated guidelines for culturally competent practice • Demonstrates an ongoing investment in creating a diversity of viewpoints and backgrounds to enhance service delivery • Provides supervisory support for orienting and training staff for culturally competent practice • Utilizes culturally competent consultants versed in the cultures of the client populations served by the agency V. Effective agency-community relations (Fong & Gibbs, 1995;Nagda and Gutierrez, 2000) • Engages with an array of advocacy groups representing different cultural and ethnic communities • Celebrates the existing community strengths in order to empower disenfranchised populations to assess and monitor culturally responsive organizational policies and procedures • Links horizontally to client communities and community networks, and vertically to professional, legislative, and funding sources (including local, national, and international networks …”

“…In contrast to the focus on cultural competency over the past four decades, this analysis builds upon the growing literature related to the development of culturally responsive human service organizations (Dana, Behn, & Gonwa, 1992;Ferguson, 1996;Fong & Gibbs, 1995;Nagda & Gutierrez, 2000;Hyde, 2003Hyde, , 2004Inglehart & Becerra, 1995;Nybell & Gray, 2004). As Chernesky (1997) notes:…”

Bilingual health communicators:role delineation issues

“…Numerous roles have been broadly described for bilingual health staff within Australian and North American literature, including direct caregiver, co-worker, cultural advocate or broker (Barbee 1987;Fong & Gibbs 1995;Fuller 1993;Jezewski 1990;Johnson et al1999;Mitchell, Malak & Small 1998). Various descriptions of these roles included a direct caregiver being a bilingual staff who uses their language in their 'normal' role; a coworker being a bilingual staff member who provides communication support to colleagues who are monolingual.…”

From Liberal Pluralism to Critical Multiculturalism: The Need for a Paradigm Shift in Multicultural Education for Social Work Practice in the United States

“…The objective is to develop cultural competence by expanding students' knowledge of the belief systems and values of particular cultural groups, the assumption being that awareness and understanding of difference allows individuals to become more flexible, tolerant, and appreciative of difference. Moreover, although it aims to develop multicultural awareness and sensitivity in agency practice, it achieves these goals by overstating the importance of culture and understating the fluid and complex nature of group relations (Fong & Gibbs, 1995). This has resulted in a multiculturalism that is more concerned with understanding difference than with helping clients gain broader social access (Fellin, 2000).…”