Think of a time in your professional experience when you were really aware of the need for cultural competency.
This is the prompt the Improve Group gave employees during the all-staff training last month. At the training, we heard many examples illustrating the importance of developing cultural competence. One staff member explained that in her former role as a loan processor at a local bank, she noticed some cultural groups were more comfortable discussing and providing legal documentation than others. She thinks she and her colleagues would have been more effective in their roles had they received training in cultural competence. Another member shared that while working on an evaluation of mental health services, they learned that many cultures do not believe in the Western notion of mental illness. This understanding shaped the evaluation team’s approach to data collection, analysis and recommendations.
Why practice culturally responsive evaluation?
The Improve Group has worked with organizations and individuals in every county in Minnesota, with dozens of communities across the U.S., and in ten countries internationally. We have learned that programs that contribute to positive outcomes for one person may not do the same for their neighbor. Similarly, we are well aware that evaluation practices designed to assess program processes or outcomes may work well in one context but not another. Our understanding of contextual differences shapes our practice of culturally responsive evaluation (CRE). We believe that CRE allows us to:
- Foster more trusting working relationships with clients and program participants
- Ensure the validity of our evaluation design, data collection and interpretation of findings
- Contribute to a better world by designing evaluations that work to avoid reinforcing cultural stereotypes and reflect awareness of structural inequalities
How do we support staff to develop cultural competence?
One way in which the Improve Group embeds CRE into our practice is by supporting our staff to develop cultural competence. We do this by:
- Emphasizing that cultural competence is a reflective process that one must practice over a lifetime, not a “simple mastery of particular knowledge and skills.”
- Including cultural competency as one of our core evaluator competencies and asking staff to reflect on and rate their development in this area.
- Providing a series of all-staff trainings on cultural competence and culturally responsive evaluation.
Next step: exploring AEA’s Essential Practices for Cultural Competence
After a staff training session focused on raising staff awareness of cultural competence with structured time to reflect on professional experiences calling for cultural responsiveness, our next session will delve deeper into this subject. We plan exploring the essential practices for CRE as outlined by the American Evaluation Association’s (AEA) Public Statement on Cultural Competence in Evaluation. These practices include:
- Acknowledging the complexity of cultural identity
- Recognizing the dynamics of power
- Recognizing and eliminating bias in social relations
- Employing culturally congruent epistemologies, theories, and methods
- Continuing self-assessments
You can access a one-page summary of AEA’s statement here.
Want to read more by the Improve Group on cultural competence? Check out a previous blog entry on going Far Beyond Good Business Practice.