Consulting Services Offered by the Institute
1. Custom Designed Training
The Multicultural Family Institute offers staff training to build cultural competence for human service professionals throughout the region. Our staff, many of whom have worked together for more than 20 years, are known throughout the United States for their conceptualizations on culture and for their work in the forefront of multiculturalism and diversity training. Many of our faculty and staff have contributed to the books Ethnicity and Family Therapy, a classic text on ethnicity, now in its second edition, which discusses the typical patterns of more than 40 American ethnic groups, and a companion book, Revisioning Family Therapy: Race, Culture and Gender in Clinical Practice, which examines the role of racision and oppression in individual, family and institutional functioning.
Our training is tailored to the specific institution. We will work with your agency to meet your specific training needs.
- Managing and Mediating Cultural Conflicts
- Dismantling Racism and Prejudice In the Worksite
- Promoting Cultural Competence for Work with Underserved Populations
2. Special Training For Schools
School Consultation for a Multicultural Society
Given the rapidly changing society we live in and the increasing demands on schools to be the core comunity that children grow up in, we believe that schools are being profoundly challenged to provide a "home base" for our nation's children. We have developed methods to help schools maximize their resources to prepare our children to be productive members of society in this new century. To do this we must deal with:
- An extremely diverse new student body
- Rising levels of ethnic and racial conflict
- Diminishing societal supports and resources for children and families in our times
- A rapidly changing base of "necessary" knowledge in an era of dramatically changing technology
Our team will work with school personnel to design a plan for adaptation to these rapidly changing factors of school life. We have a track record with schools that have called us in for consultation with faculty tensions, student racial conflicts, de facto segregation reflecting the segregation of our society and to help school staff feel empowered to see the changes as an opportunity, rather than a threat. We offer:
- Consultation to Administrative staff
- Consultation to teachers and other school staff
- Development of programs to help students with conflict resolution and with improving ethnic, gender and racial intergroup relations
- Workshops for school personnel
- Development of programs for parents to improve family-school collaboration
- Groups and Workshops for students to raise cultural consciousness and improve group relations
3. Special Training For Health Care and Social Service Agencies and Businesses
- Consultation to managerial staff on employee relations
- Consultation to workers on cultural differences and managing conflicts
- Development of programs to help with conflict resolution and with improving ethnic, gender and racial intergroup relations
- Workshops for staff
- Development of programs for undoing racism, sexism and prejudice in the work force
- Seminars on Incorporating Multiculturalism in our Work Settings
4. Diversity Consultation
The true measure of a democracy is not rule by the majority, but how respectfully the society deals with the opinions of the minority.
The Multicultural Family Institute offers diversity consultation to:
- Schools
- Social Service Agencies
- Businesses
- Health Care Facilities
- Criminal Justice Institutions
In our consultation with schools and other agencies we will:
- Present workshops and provide materials which will increase the cultural expertise of school and agency staff
- Help define guidelines for schools and agencies so that they can assess their progress toward cultural competence
- Identify resources and provide materials on cultural issues which can be infused into curriculum or staff development programs
- Coach administrators to creatively manage an increasingly diverse work force
The grounding assumptions we start with:
- We learn primarily from each other.
- We need to get the "right" attitude before we can learnÑone of collaboration
- Much of the work we need to do is about ourselves by going inside- & admitting our mistakes.
Defining identity in an inclusive way, locating ourselves and others in something bigger than ourselves is essential for our identity-taking into account family, culture, class, race, spiritual background, work and friendship networks, and community- even though forming a positive identity may mean transforming our view of these factors.
“Prejudice is a burden which confuses the past, threatens the future, and and renders the present inaccessible.”
