Diversity, Awareness, Inclusion
Consulting, coaching & COURSE DeveloPMENT

Our clients (or students) are the heroes and heroines of their own lives: they have survived, and in some situations thrived, finding their way to the moment when we begin our work together.  Approaching this relationship through a lens of cultural humility asks us to strive for a deeper level of openness to our clients’ experience and the way they see the world: it integrates collaborative and strengths-based practice with our own ongoing commitment to compassionate self-awareness, encouraging us to see without judgment how our own experience and identities impact the work we do and the values we hold.  The practice of cultural humility is gentle, forgiving, empowering and transformational, allowing both client and clinician to experience growth, intimacy, and greater authenticity.  Attending this training will provide theory behind this new approach to direct practice, as well as multiple opportunities to implement it and experience its benefits firsthand. 

 We cannot dismantle what we don't know how to discuss, and a productive discussion must be grounded in accurate information.  This workshop provides participants with the knowledge, language, opportunities and tools to boldly and productively address issues of race, racism, and skin color privilege, inside and outside the workplace.  In a respectful, intentional environment, we will have a conversation about the socially-constructed meanings of skin color and race, and the resulting impact of racism in society, with a particular focus on how race has been used to divide us and to benefit white-European people. We will discuss both historical and present-day racism in the United States to provide context for our current circumstances.  Finally and most importantly, we will work together toward solutions regarding what we can do to debunk, dismantle and defeat structural and individual racism. 

 This training helps participants foster a workplace or classroom environment that is welcoming and supportive of individuals from a vast array of cultures, including but not limited to cultures of race, ethnicity, gender, sexual identity, religion, body size, citizenship, ability and age.  Our identities and experiences impact the lens through which we see the world, and this workshop seeks to assist participants in becoming more clear regarding those identities, how they impact our own behaviors, values and biases, and how to create a workplace that allows everyone to feel valued and welcome.      The consistent feedback from this course is that it is uplifting and fun, as well as informative and insight-bearing, and that it can bring a greater sense of community and trust to the work environment.
 

The question is no longer whether we will have LGBTQIA co-workers, students or clients, but why we might not know that we do, and whether we are adequately prepared to serve these individuals knowledgeably and respectfully.  So let's talk openly about sexuality and gender, and what - if anything - the two have to do with one another.  This highly-experiential and interactive workshop will explain in plain language - through case examples, group discussion and video - exactly what it means to identify as gay, lesbian, bisexual, queer, transgender, cisgender, intersex, non-binary, asexual and gender queer. 

One of the reasons gender identity can be confusing is our lack of understanding  regarding the ways that we "perform" gender every single day.  We'll clarify the differences between sex and gender, bring cultural binary-gender expectations out into the  open, discuss the social impact of ideas regarding masculinity and femininity, and arrive at a level of ease and fluency with regard to understanding and talking about gender expression and identity. 

There is language our clients, co-workers or students use that can provoke a - shall we say - potent response.  This brief, solution-focused training seeks to help participants better understand the ways we respond when someone uses language we perceive as  offensive; to evaluate the impact of the setting and the speaker’s emotional state when deciding  how we respond; to increase our awareness of  our own verbal triggers and how to determine whether and how to respond, and to provide solutions for engaging in "confrontation without humiliation:" responding in ways that honor our own boundaries without shaming the speaker.