What Is Cultural Competency In A Community Essay

Every person has grown up with a slightly different culture and experience due to differences in social location. As social workers, although we may try to convince others and ourselves that we are able to objectively look beyond differences, we are all human who also differ in our experiences. This is why it is important to be able to recognize and embrace differences in culture so that we can effectively help our participants, who are often people who face oppression and marginalization. As such, this paper will explain my knowledge and experiences with a group who has faced the aforementioned adversities and how I intend to be culturally competent when working with this group. The population I have chosen to discuss in this paper is Indigenous

This is important to understand when looking at Indigenous women, as culture encompasses both ethnicity as well as gender (Bogo, 2006, p. 35). I have some cultural competency for women, seeing as I am a woman, and although I have a relatively little understanding of an Aboriginal woman’s culture at this point, it is important that I acknowledge that for all persons, including Indigenous women, no one’s culture is congruent for every single member of the group. Therefor, in order to gain cultural competency in a way that does not assume a universal experience, Bogo (2006) suggests the importance of taking a stance of naïveté so that the participant can tell the worker about their own culture (p. 38). This will also help to develop a non-judgmental stance, if one comes into their practice without assumptions. In his article, Michael Anthony Hart discusses the importance of having a non-judgmental stance in Aboriginal culture, as he says it “limit[s] a person’s self determination” (1999, p. 99). It is also important to keep current with one’s cultural competency of a population, as both the culture and practices surrounding culture may change over time. For example, it was once believed that there were only four major groups of culture (including Native American), and that each group was believed to make characteristics of the client, rather than just a portion of the client’s identity (Bogo, 2006, p. 36). Hart (1999) agrees that in an Aboriginal approach to social work, acknowledging culture’s effect on shaping a population, such as that of residential schools, is important (p.