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Session Title: Culturally Competent Organizations: What Are They and How Do You Measure Them?
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Panel Session 292 to be held in Room 113 in the Convention Center on Thursday, Nov 6, 10:55 AM to 12:25 PM
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Sponsored by the Multiethnic Issues in Evaluation TIG
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| Chair(s): |
| Kien Lee,
Association for the Study and Development of Community,
kien@capablecommunity.com
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| Abstract:
Presenters will discuss their frameworks for defining and measuring organizational cultural competency and how to use the findings to inform strategies to increase an organization's cultural competency. Three efforts will be presented: an initiative aimed at addressing health disparities by building the cultural competency of a variety of organizations; the development and validation of an instrument to assess the cultural competence of community organizations that serve people with disabilities; and the implementation of a survey and process that benchmarked changes in a foundation's philosophies and underlying assumptions about diversity grantmaking and culturally competent grantmaking practices. The presenters intend to engage the audience in a discussion about the following: What makes an organization culturally competent? What are the best measures of an organization's cultural competency? How do you use the evaluation findings to enhance an organization's structure, internal processes, and effectiveness? What are the challenges of such evaluations?
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Lessons Learned From An Organizational Cultural Competency Building Initiative
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| Chris Armijo,
Colorado Foundation for Families and Children,
carmijo@coloradofoundation.org
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| Erica Baruch,
Colorado Foundation for Families and Children,
ebaruch@coloradofoundation.org
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The Colorado Foundation for Children and Families (CFFC) serves as the coordinating agency for The Colorado Trust's Equality in Health initiative. As such, CFFC provides capacity building and evaluation support to the 26 grantees participating in the initiative. CFFC works closely with the initiative's evaluator (Association for the Study and Development of Community) and The Colorado Trust to ensure a seamless support system for the grantees. In this presentation, CFFC staff will share the framework it uses to define cultural competency and to guide its capacity building strategies; how it works with the evaluator to use the evaluator's findings to inform its strategies; and some of the opportunities and challenges encountered so far during the capacity building process.
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Evaluating Organizational Cultural Competency: Approach and Lessons Learned
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| LaKeesha Woods,
Association for the Study and Development of Community,
lwoods@capablecommunity.com
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| Kien Lee,
Association for the Study and Development of Community,
kien@capablecommunity.com
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The presentation by the Association for the Study and Development of Community complements the previous one by CFFC. ASDC is the evaluator for The Colorado Trust's Equality in Health initiative. In this presentation, ASDC staff will describe the design and methods used for evaluating the extent to which 26 grantees' organizational cultural competency changed over time, and how the change affected the grantees' capacity to reduce racial and ethnic health disparities. In particular, we will describe how we developed an instrument and a process to assess the grantees' organizational cultural competency. We also will share some of the challenges encountered during the assessment process and how we addressed these challenges, as well as other lessons learned.
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Evaluation of a Foundation's Multicultural Transformation
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| Hanh Cao Yu,
Social Policy Research Associates,
hanh_cao_yu@spra.com
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What does it mean for a foundation to become 'culturally competent'? Social Policy Research Associates (SPRA) explores this question through an organizational learning and evaluation framework that includes a focus on a shared vision, an authorizing culture to support multiculturalism, and appropriate organizational policies, procedures and systems to implement diversity-related grantmaking principles. Based on this framework, SPRA used mixed-methods to track the institutional culture and evolution of a major foundation over a five-year period. In this session, SPRA will present a survey that benchmarked changes in the foundation's philosophies and underlying assumptions about diversity grantmaking, the foundation's commitment to a diversity focus, and culturally competent grantmaking practices. SPRA will share measures that were developed to assess foundation staff's comfort-level in explicitly discussing and promoting diversity; their perceived level of support at different levels of the organization; and their sense of reward and accountability for diversity-related work.
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Development, Validation and Use of the Cultural Competence Assessment Instrument for Evaluating Organizational Cultural Competence
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| Yolanda Suarez-Balcazar,
University of Illinois Chicago,
ysuarez@uic.edu
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| Fabricio Balcazar,
University of Illinois Chicago,
fabricio@uic.edu
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| Tina Taylor Ritzler,
University of Illinois Chicago,
tritzler@uic.edu
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Human service organizations are under increasing pressure from various stakeholders to become culturally competent, especially in the fields of psychology, counseling, rehabilitation, and health care (e.g., APA Guidelines on Multicultural Education, Training, Research and Practice, 2003; Code of Professional Ethics for Rehabilitation Counselors, 2001). Researchers and providers in multiple disciplines have proposed various skills, knowledge, and abilities that can increase cultural competence in systems, organizations, and programs. Although several conceptual frameworks and models of cultural competence have been suggested in a variety of fields (e.g., nursing and counseling psychology) only a few experimentally validated instruments to assess cultural competence are available. In this presentation, we describe the development and validation of the Cultural Competence Assessment Instrument as well as describe how we use it and a goal setting and follow along process to evaluate and increase the cultural competence of community-based organizations that serve people with disabilities.
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