Overview

You are an employee at Spokes of Hope Worldwide (SoHW), a nonprofit organization that seeks to broaden access to education by donating bicycles to students who need them. Recently, the Society for New Americans (SNA) approached your organization with a proposal to set up a community partnership. SNA is a community nonprofit organization that assists new immigrants and resettled refugees with their transition to life in the United States. Part of SNA’s mission is to increase access to education within the different cultural communities it serves. SNA is interested in working with SoHW to provide bicycles to these same communities. Its employees are excited by SoHW’s long history of international cross-cultural partnerships, and they are hoping to hear a bit more about how your employees would approach this new partnership from a culturally competent perspective. They have expressed concerns about misunderstandings because their employees and clients come from all over the world. It will be necessary to train employees at SoHW and demonstrate cultural competence to SNA. Greg Gears, your supervisor, has tasked you with leading this effort. This will require you to develop a training handout for SoHW employees, complete and evaluate reflection activities, and speak to employees at SoHW and the SNA board of directors.

Directions

Spokes of Hope Worldwide employees will need a comprehensive explanation of cultural competence in preparation for this partnership with the Society for New Americans. Create a 2- to 3-page training handout that explains the key concepts of cultural competence in terms that anyone can understand and relates these concepts to the SoHW mission. Your handout should do the following:

• Explain cultural competence.
• Identify at least three ways that culture impacts communication between people.
• Identify at least three verbal or nonverbal cues to pay attention to during communication with people from other cultures and how best to respond to these unfamiliar cultural cues.
• Give and analyze at least three situations in which culture plays an important role in people’s relations (can be hypothetical or drawn from personal experience).
• Explain why developing and maintaining cross-cultural relations is a useful skill.
• Use the following terms in context
  • Beliefs
  • Biases
  • Culture
  • Cultural competence
  • Cultural relativism
  • Cultural universals
  • Ethnocentrism
  • Globalization
  • Norms
  • Society
  • Values