The authors of Embracing Cultural Competency are available for interviews and writing articles for your periodical or blog. Below are ideas suggested by the authors.

For further details, please contact the author's publicist:

Becky Andrews, Fieldstone Alliance
651-556-4503
bandrews@FieldstoneAlliance.org

Ideas
1. What is cultural competency exactly?

• Why is moving beyond “diversity” essential for nonprofit leaders?
• I’m not a person of color; how does cultural competency relate to my work?
• What is important to understand about how cultural competency affects my work?

3. Why talking about cultural competency is so challenging. Culture is a wonderful vehicle for embracing those who differ from us. Yet grappling with culture is exhausting. The concept of culture can be one of the most effective means for exclusion. We yearn for conversation about culture, and we fear it at the same time. There are several reasons for this.

4. The "three Cs" of effective capacity building:

• Context: understanding historical and cultural realities that relate to the current situation
• Community: using a process that stays centered in a group of people who face their own unique challenges and possibilities
• Change: altering conditions in ways that advance equity for people and communities of color

5. Three methods for assessing your organizational culture with a way of considering whether the organization's underlying beliefs and assumptions will hinder or assist a change the organization wishes to make.

6. Using the power of language to unleash capacity, or moving from charity to justice. For people who work in the nonprofit sector, one of these novel language forms involves a shift from solving problems to unleashing capacity. Example from a homeless shelter for women: Rather than doing the usual intake—asking them to share their problems--we asked each woman to identify three skills, gifts, or talents she brought into the household.

7. Six case studies in which the authors interviewed organizations at three "cusps" (executive transition; change in life stage; externally forced change) to show how elements of organizational culture can be unearthed and suggest ways in which that knowledge may be acted on.

8. Moving beyond our naive sense of fairness to see how structural and institutional racism is an intentional way to maintain the status quo, not something that is fair to everyone.