Cultural Competency Committee

Paper Summary:

Developing a cultural competency committee is one alternative in the search for compliance. Recent federal, state, and local laws mandate that multicultural considerations be taken into account in virtually every aspect of public life. This paper discusses how, in the case of behavioral health organizations and agencies, which deal with the most intimate problems of people from many cultures and tradition, not to mention with many different languages as their native tongues, t is paramount to understand all the facets of multiculturalism so that, if the agency decides that instituting a cultural competency committee is the proper course, it will also attend to the proper issues. It looks at one issue that has recently been raised: whether cultural competency and all its ramifications is, in fact, a new twist on racism. Nonetheless, it is clear that behavioral health organizations do deal with many cultures, and approaches must be found to do so in ways that are not discriminatory in intent or in fact.

Introduction and Statement of the Problem
Legacy of Error
Ethnic Composition of U.S. Society
Origins of Multi-Cultural Counseling/Cultural Competency
Review of the Literature
Methodology
Cultural Competency Questionnaire
References
Appendix A

From the Paper:

"There is almost no area of human life that has not been touched in the past fifty years by the specter of discrimination. Although it would seem amazing to some, the fields of psychology, counseling and behavioral therapies have not gone untouched by racism. Indeed, covert and overt racist behavior and thinking was endemic to the American Psychological Association (APA), the academy and mental health organizations during that period. (Morris & Robinson, 2000, p. 239) It is not surprising then that now, in a more enlightened period, those same institutions would seek to rectify this attitude and behavior. One means of doing that is training and managing for "cultural competency". This cultural competency, while needed in general, is assumed also to influence the effectiveness of counseling when it must be done in a multicultural setting. (Morris & Robinson, 2000, p. 239)"

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