We offer standard and customised cultural competence training for mental health practitioners, commercial organisations and helping professions. Below is a sample for a 1 or 2 day workshop with options for between day reflective practice and minimum competence assessment.

Cultural Competence Using Antidiscrimination Foundations

“All relationships are cross-cultural relationships. We all vary uniquely by our contexts, identities, and geographically situated sociocultural experiences”

This training aims to help you foster cross-cultural relationships to be able to develop a more attuned understanding of the client’s world.

As effective client relationships are mediated by individuals’ cultural awareness of themselves, this training will lead you through experiential exercises to help you reflect upon your cultural context(s) and experience how relational context development is always important. You will have the opportunity to apply these ideas interactively in small group sessions in preparation for practice.

Overview

The training is structured into nine units, with discussions, exercises, case examples, and relational development and attunement strategies provided throughout. There will be opportunities to ask questions, bring in your own experiences, and gain insight from tutors who work in cross-cultural helping and therapeutic professions with a “culture as standard” ethos with all clients (including similarly cultural, western/nonwestern, nationalities, faiths, and ethnicities).

1. What and Why Cultural Competence and Anti-Discrimination Practice?
2. Base concepts: identity, community, intersectionality, positionality, power, variation, worldviews, relativity, and communication styles. Dangers of an unexplored self.
3. Discover and explore cultural variations without assumptions: family, community, beliefs, language, gender, class, communication, and meaning. sensitivity of topics, and so on.
4. Exploring oneself within the cultural context (experiential applying concepts to oneself and colleagues)
5. Developing self-ethics: positionality, cultural humility, courage, and avoiding harm
6. Developing cross-cultural relationships, communication, and language attunement, culturally relative, working with case reflection. The top lessons learned from both good and poor practice
7. Exploring and listening to the client’s common cross-cultural conflicts and transition experiences (in a person’s life, citizenship, migration, transition, and acculturation)
8. Organisation specific casework: reflective case studies
9. Towards whole practice: Self in context for all humans: Next steps for self-development

Learning Outcomes

By the end of this course, you will:

• Understand and be able to explain the importance of various aspects of cultural and anti-discrimination concepts needed as a standard part of developing relationships and delivering equitable services.
• Develop a deeper empathy and understanding of your own and others’s cultural context, identity, and worldview, and their meaning and relevance to the relationship and anti-discrimination practice.
• Develop strategies to build the relationship, attune and broach cultural differences and intersecting social identities, and build a better understanding of your client’s context
• Learn from common mistakes in working with individuals and groups that can form (often invisible) barriers to the relationship and impact service outcomes.
• Foster personal virtues that are evidenced as beneficial to cross-cultural engagement
• Situate your learning and continuous edge of development by working in a cultural and antidiscrimination informed manner