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BUILDING PERSONAL AND AGENCY CULTURAL COMPETENCE
. . . promotes a family’s ability to cope with difficult situations and resolve family problems.
The family lives in a familiar community of individuals and services. Friends, relatives and other kin, neighbors, local businesspersons, their faith community, schools and others form a network of individuals and organizations that know and are known by the family. When a family becomes involved with Children’s Services, the territory may become unfamiliar. When that involvement results in involuntary services and referrals to other public agencies outside of the community network, the territory can feel alien and threatening.
Traditionally, County Departments of Social Services have relied on their own resources and other public service providers when families needed help coping with family crises. Since 1980, Federal law (P.L. 96-272: The Adoption Assistance and Child Welfare Act) requires that substitute care for children be located in the child’s own community whenever possible. Many agencies, however, have looked first at placement resources that were already available -- licensed foster care facilities. The informal support network and community resources known to and trusted by the family have frequently been viewed with less respect than traditional public helping agencies.
Community-based support for families requires a paradigm shift that looks first to the family’s own community for support and services, that promotes collaboration between service providers, and that places the services where the family needs and can access them within their own community.
This section includes practice tools on:
• Interagency Collaboration
• Building Personal and Agency Cultural Competence
Collaboration, in the context of Children’s Services, is a process of involving clients and other agencies in order to reach common goals. Whether interagency collaboration is designed to benefit one child or family, or is planned to enhance the quality of life for an entire community, it is an open and shared decision-making process. Those who collaborate draw upon the strengths, abilities and resources of each member in the group.
The County Department of Social Services has legal responsibility for assessment, case planning and review, arranging or providing services, and ensuring aftercare services. It is the County Department of Social Services that is responsible to the State Division of Social Services when there is an audit regarding the use of Federal funds. However, while the legal responsibility is an established factor, case decision-making and service provision is most effective when the process is collaborative.
Unfortunately, collaboration often begins out of frustration about a lack of coordination between systems working with the same families. Families may be known as clients or consumers by several community agencies or organizations. If there is a lack of a coherent coordinated services plan, individual service providers may actually be working at cross purposes or, at least, defining different criteria of compliance for families.
Regulatory and practice constraints can act as barriers to effective collaboration.
Inflexible interpretation of laws, agency rules or procedures may limit an agency staff’s ability to develop creative solutions or interventions to address the individual needs of families and children. While many agencies actually have the authority to share confidential information, individual staff members may refuse to share because they are concerned about inadvertently breaching confidentiality.
North Carolina General Statutes authorize the chief district court judge in each district to designate, by standing order, agencies in the district as “agencies authorized to share information” and names agencies that may be so designated. 1 Agencies so designated shall share with one another, upon request, information that is in their possession that is relevant to any case in which a petition is filed alleging that a juvenile is abused, neglected, or dependent, and shall continue to do so until the juvenile is no longer subject to the juvenile jurisdiction of the court. These agencies include, but are not limited to: Mental Health, Public Health, Social Services, local law enforcement, local schools, the District Attorney, Juvenile Services, and the Guardian Ad Litem. The law further states that “nothing in this section or any other provision of law shall preclude any other necessary sharing of information among agencies.”
In order to achieve the goals of specific family cases, it is important to implement a strategy of collaboration with all the agencies and persons involved with the family. The family-specific collaborative group develops one coordinated assessment that involves the family in a comprehensive evaluation of their strengths and needs. The first consideration in developing a collaborative team is the resources and needs of the family and child being served.
County Departments of Social Services should encourage collaboration among social workers and foster parents. Many foster parents can share parenting skills and experience with birth families and can learn from birth families about the child’s history and needs. Foster parents can also provide first hand knowledge of the child’s strengths and needs based on daily contact with the child for court reviews and case planning.
Community agencies that strive to provide effective wraparound services for a child or family should coordinate with all service providers to develop individualized family-centered plans that are based upon the family’s strengths, values and preferences.
The Department of Social Services does not have the resources to meet the needs of all children and families in crisis in the community, nor can it achieve permanency for children without the community's help. The Department of Social Services has a critical role in keeping the community informed about patterns of problems that are affecting child well-being, such as:
Ideally, a collaborative effort includes all persons and organizations that are involved with families in the community:
Each individual, in order to become culturally competent, must first develop an awareness of his or her own biases and make ongoing efforts to overcome and prevent these biases from having a negative impact on the lives of others. Each person develops his or her own values and beliefs based on his or her interaction with the environment. Most people have values and beliefs about the world that are first taught within families and culture. It is important to remember that because we are all raised differently, and are exposed to differing cultures, we must assume that our personal world view is neither prevalent nor correct for others. For example, many people of color now living in the United States--African-American, Latino, Native American, Aleut, and Asian-- have different concepts of the traditional “family” than do most Euro-Americans. For most Euro-Americans, the primary unit of the traditional family is of the nuclear family, and as the dominant culture, values the independent nuclear family as the “normal” view and experience of family. The cultural experience of many persons of color is a long and rich tradition of the interdependent extended family and kinship network as being the base family unit. Even this seemingly simple difference in perspective has had significant impact on public policy and practice.
Social workers representing agencies should also be aware of cultural insensitivity at the agency level, as represented in policy and practice. The following considerations can to determine areas that need improvement.
Neighborhood family support groups, consumer advisory councils, and community leaders are valuable resources in fostering cultural competence among staff and board members. It may be helpful to establish an ongoing dialogue with consumer groups to identify and address cultural issues in service delivery.
Specialized training to improve cultural competence is available in both the public and private sectors. Staff members who do not demonstrate tolerance of or appreciation for persons of other cultural backgrounds and whose attitudes and resulting behaviors negatively impact the delivery of agency services should be given an opportunity to attend intensive training. To emphasize the importance of this issue, intolerance should be addressed as a performance issue.
1 N.C.G.S. 7B-2901.
2 U.S. Department of Health and Human Resources, “A Guide to Enhancing the Cultural Competence of Runaway and Homeless Youth Programs,” January 1994. Administration on Children, Youth, and Families, Family Youth Services Bureau, p.14.
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For questions or clarification on any of the policy contained in these manuals, please contact your local county office. |
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