What Is a Culture Broker? Providing Culturally Competent Services to Foreign-Born Persons with Disabilities
Since the early 1980s, about 850,000 persons per year have come to the United States from other countries. Thirty years ago, about one in twenty Americans was foreign-born; today the ratio is approximately one in ten, and in many areas it is much higher. At one time, cross-cultural skills seemed to be needed mainly by diplomats, missionaries and Peace Corps Volunteers. Today nearly everyone in the U.S. has contact with persons from other cultures. Persons providing disability and rehabilitation related services are no exception.
Coping with the effects of a disability can be a challenge no matter where one is born. For a recent immigrant the challenge is often magnified. In addition to difficulties with language, housing and employment, the person may also have difficulty understanding and accessing rehabilitation services. Providers often experience frustration that arises from miscommunication and differing cultural perspectives.
While persons from ethnic minorities make up approximately 25-30% of the U.S. population, they make up less than 8% of its population of health and rehabilitation professionals. Although efforts are being made to recruit more service providers from other cultures, within the foreseeable future most foreign-born consumers will be served by professionals from cultural backgrounds very different from their own. Recent immigrants often have perceptions of disability, rehabilitation, and independence that are different from, and sometimes at odds with, the values and practices of the U.S. rehabilitation service system. Therefore, it is critical for all service providers to understand how cultural differences can affect their services.
The Center for International Rehabilitation Research Information and Exchange (CIRRIE), with funding from the National Institute for Rehabilitation Research Information and Exchange of the U.S. Department of Education, has developed a workshop and a monograph series to help service providers to bridge the gap between the culture of the U.S. service system and the cultures of foreign-born persons. The workshop, Culture Brokering: Bridging the Gap Between Foreign-Born Consumers and Rehabilitation Services, is based on a model of a "culture broker", a service provider who is able to assist foreign-born consumers to understand and navigate the system, as well as to advocate for the sometimes unique needs of persons from other cultures. The workshop is offered to all types of disability and rehabilitation related service providers, including physical, occupational and speech language therapists, vocational rehabilitation personnel, special educators, and staff of centers for independent living. Because of the role that independent living centers play, not only in providing services themselves, but also in linking consumers to other services and advocating for them, the staff of independent living centers are often very effective as culture brokers.
The CIRRIE workshop is available to organizations that wish to provide such training for their members or employees. The workshop can be presented in half-day, full day, or two day formats. It is currently offered at no cost, other than the travel expenses of the presenters. Further information about the workshop can be found on the CIRRIE web site at http://cirrie.buffalo.edu/culture.html.
CIRRIE has also developed a monograph on Culture Brokering that will be published by July 2001. In addition to understanding the general process of working with persons from different cultures, whatever those cultures may be, effective culture brokering also requires at least some knowledge of the culture of the country of origin of the foreign born consumer. The culture-related concepts of disability and independence, traditional family roles, and expectations of rehabilitation are among the factors about which the provider should be aware in order to provide effective services. For this reason, the CIRRIE project is developing a series of monographs on the cultures of ten of the most common countries of origin of the foreign-born in the U.S. These include: Mexico, China, India, Vietnam, the Philippines, Korea, the Dominican Republic, El Salvador, Cuba and Jamaica. Most of these monographs will be published in the second semester of 2001, and will be available in printed versions and on the CIRRIE web site (http://cirrie.buffalo.edu/). The monographs will also be available in alternative formats.
|
