Ask Nicole: How Can I Be More Culturally Responsive?
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Two months ago, I facilitated an evaluation meeting for one of my clients. The client, an organization that specializes in community-based health peer-to-peer training related to pregnancy, birth, breastfeeding and early parenting, received funding for a multi-year birth equity project that also includes program evaluation capacity building.
During the meeting, the staff and I had a conversation about the various aspects of program evaluation, from planning and implementation, to data interpretation and measuring impact.
A takeaway message I gave to the staff is that, try as we might, it can be difficult to design and implement and evaluation process that is unbiased. Why? Situational Awareness.
In the general sense, situational awareness is being aware of your surroundings. This keep you on your toes and more likely to sense danger. In the context of program evaluation, situational awareness can help you spot red flags as well as help you become aware of not only your surroundings, but also what your presence is adding to that environment.
So, I asked the staff:
“How can you and your organization become more culturally responsive?”
Many under sourced communities are already leery of researchers, evaluators and anyone coming to their community to collect data. As a Black person and as a woman, you’d think it would be easy for me to go into a community where I share the same race and/or gender. But sometimes, that can be where the commonality ends.
There’s a power dynamic at play, intimidation, a history of mistrust of researchers and evaluators, and the lived experiences of marginalized communities being viewed as subjects or statistics rather people with important and valuable stories to tell. And I’m at a point in my personal and professional life where I can acknowledge the various levels of privilege and power I have.
It’s very easy to become comfortable with our commonalities, because those commonalities can be the “in” we need into a community setting. But you still have to do the work before, during, and after to ensure you’re being as intentionally responsive to a community’s culture as possible. And “culture” is more than just race/ethnicity. It encompasses age, gender identity, religion, language, ability, sexual preference, geographic region, physical and mental health, how an organization operates, and more.
More importantly, you have to be aware of your biases and motivations, as well as know who has the power, money, and political ties to make decisions within the organization you’re working with and within the communities they serve. You also have to know the systems people are operating under that can impact cultural responsiveness. Just as I reflect after a project has ended, I also pinpoint the context that a project is operating within before I start a project and during the project. Here’s a 3-part reflective process I use to reflect on my level of cultural responsiveness. These questions are adaptable to any situation where you’re interacting with a client and a community or cultural group: