Assignment 2: RA 1: Human Service Needs Assessment Report
Running head: COMMUNITY AGENCY OBSERVATION 1
Analysis and Evaluation of the Community Agency Observation
Student Name
University
Title
The Culmer Community Action Center provides social services to our society. It is known to provide many types of public assistance and is also known as principal means for all those looking for some type of public assistance, with a variety of areas served. The community center’s main mission is to provide services of support and welfare to the public, whether at and individual or family level. The Culmer Community Action Center has a variety of social service programs and fields that work for many different situations. The provide services to children and families, healthcare coverage, daycare assistance, opportunities of employment, immigration resources, job training, elderly services, etc. The list of services is extensive. They provide shelters to the homeless, food drives for the less fortunate, family development, computerized classes for senior citizens and low income assistance. Treatment is managed to those individuals who are mentally incapacitated and also given to families to resolve struggles. The services listed above are utilized by our surrounding community, to those who need it, at any individual’s request. The time frame to try and complete a mission is approximately 6 months, subject to each individual’s particular case. The outside surroundings consist of the complications of problems at hand, the satisfactoriness of the organization which regulates the revenue of admittance and finally the combination of the people being served (California Health and Human Services Agency, 2016).
The Policies of the Community Center
The community center goes by the policies which are listed in the manual. The policies are a precise explanation of the procedures and rules for the management to go by through the course of the community centers programs. The management policy consists of procedures to be shadowed throughout strategy improvement, managing of funds, as well as the everyday protocol of the workplace. The techniques for overseeing the services needed are contained in the policy manual. The rules in the manual hold guidance plans, practices and protocols to be followed by the center (Florida Department of Human Services, 2016). The Notice of Privacy Practices is another set of policies, which is an explanation of how the individual’s medical information is protected and can be utilized by the Culmer Community Action Center or any release that relates to the healthcare, treatment, or procedures. According to the law (Gostin, 2008), for instance; the guide designates the code of behavior to observe when the person who is giving treatment wants to access the data for an assessment for the services be given.
The Location of the Organization
The Community Center is located in a suburb called Overtown, in Miami, Florida. It is a subdivision of the city which has been included into the organization and still experiencing a number of parts of necessary team improvements. Public transportation is very efficient in Miami and can be used to get to the facility. Depending on where you are coming from it is probably 20 minutes to the max an hour to get to from any part of Miami, of course that is depending on traffic.
At the current location, the center deals with a variety of different backgrounds and races, which seem to be evenly dispersed throughout the overall population. Miami is very diverse and there is generally never one single ethnic group that makes up the majority of our city’s inhabitants (statistics?). The difference in races sometimes plays a role in dictating the services provided by the center. The leading facet that significantly impacts the service to deliver to recipients is the concentration of regions run by a variety of gangs. For example, a variety of residents who reside in an area controlled by a gang greatly evade coming to the center’s place of business because they are fearful of creating conflict or rivalries. The center’s location often becomes a gang’s local hangout for their meetings which can interfere with the center’s purposes. Nevertheless, there is a great deal of security tools put into place to protect the environment whereby an inception of encounters is prohibited either between the gang or security guards.
The Décor of the Center
The decorations around the center display a place of different cultures and diversity. There are photos a children of different races playing together, photographs of historical places in our city, plants and also pictures of social workers smiling, while they appear to be diligently working with the public. Overall the place is a welcoming environment to all. All the notices and pamphlets are given in multiple languages, such as English, Spanish and French to help assist each family or person. The locals of Miami can professionally relate with the implemented assessment of displays which appear on television screens around the waiting area. They also have some family friendly advertising materials for low income things to do with your children and family and also how tips on how to reduce your medical prescriptions. The entire center has many different diverse filers, posters and other choices and variety of pamphlets to read. Pictorial messages are also personalized to outfit a culturally open and knowledgeable relationship amongst the individuals receiving service and the service center employees. The painting on the main wall of the waiting area where you will see the Director of First Impressions is a picture of a place in Overtown which is the location of the Culmer Community Center. It portrays the obvious problems in the suburb and relays them to the purposes of the Culmer Community Action Center which was placed there to provide services to the community to help better its surroundings and make the city and surrounding areas more self-sufficient.
The Composition of the Staff
The composition of the staff members at the Culmer Community Action Center constitutes a vast variety of individuals from numerous racial and ethnic backgrounds. There are eight African Americans, about six individuals of the Hispanic origin, four Caucasian Americans and I also encountered some individuals who spoke Creole and French. Amongst these ethnic groups, they leadership and lower-level roles seem to be equally distributed. Each role is dependent upon the competency of that individual, their educational background, and prior learning skills and training. An ethnic group such as this is important when creating a culturally knowledgeable service center. The staff members of the community center also have a wide-ranging attribute of class in the various levels low, middle and high classes of derivation (Murray, 2012). The center compares this to the statistics that a group of multicultural people have been known to have a social class that that classifies them; therefore the center’s associates can assuredly pinpoint a common problem that relates to a certain cultural individual(s) in the specified societal class stages. Cultural competency amongst the center’s members is genuinely engrained in the perception of subconsciously recognizing culture within one’s self, but in the best interest and support of the center. The associates can also apt in the cultural setting of the public being served contentedly, as in the scenario of African Americans serving the populations in Overtown. They have established their abilities to form trust within their recipients who receive service, as they generally can relate to their beliefs, historical backgrounds and religion within the Overtown population. As a whole, the associates are involved in the whole process of educating themselves with each cultural circumstance that comes about whether it is when providing services or found within themselves. This is an accurate definition of cultural competency.
Mission Statement Description
To thrive as better community: serving essentials to the people who are in need. The mission statement focuses on the key points of the center which is to help those in need and help solve the issues of the community’s situation. Overall, to promise this mission with diversity, the organization trains the associates with training programs to expand their expertise in treating situation that occur in common cultural areas, as well as training them with the effective tools to overcome cultural and language barriers. They embrace the idea of developing worldwide to gratify the necessities of the diversified societies. A similar idea is implemented in the outline used when choosing the center’s associates on the foundation of expanding the class, culture, any other ethnic merits (Burger, 2013).
Multi-cultural Aspects of Occurrences
In one particular case, a person who fled from Bosnia came to the center. He was not able to understand the English language and does not have the financial and/or other means to survive on a daily basis. Although he was vulnerable to living in poverty, he had other barriers that didn’t allow him to access the system that provides help. Several workers got together with a voice translator machine to help them communicate with the man. That was really dedicated team work. Together they were able to contact the embassy of Bosnia and connect him with others from his country that has gone through the same issues. In this case, the prior training that was implemented and given to the center’s associates played a huge role in how to handle this gentleman’s multi-cultural circumstance.
Another case of a culturally competency at this center was when I saw an associate positively impacting and providing service to recipients who were looking into adopting a child internationally. These two parents came to visit the location with a 6 year old boy they adopted from South Africa. His mind is already extremely fixed in with the cultural ideas of South Africa. This culture differs much from the culture he has been adopted into. Although they are competent in communicating with each other, the parental units feared that he wasn’t blending in well in the culture they had placed him in. (Deibert, 2013). The associate gave the family a set a date to received family therapy that would give them privacy and help them as a family to adjust and to boost the self-esteem of the young boy as well. Because their culture is based on a solid base of a lot of family, the associate requested assistance from another associate who was also African American, so they could work together to allow them to feel better connected and make sure all their needs were met.
For the above set of examples, these associates gave me the inclination that they had a great deal of understanding of various backgrounds and worked in teams or shifted groups to make sure that their recipients care was top priority and met to their fullest needs. It showed a picture of multicultural understanding. In the first case, the associates gave a sense of fitting it to the immigrant by referring them to another location where immigrants with similar issues from his homeland also went for assistance. By understanding and redefining his mind set, they allowed him to find a comfort zone to assist him with his social surroundings. In the second case, the associate knew that an old-style of Western healing is identified to be more distinctive and requiring a logical way of working which is generally not promising in these kinds of situations (Harris, 2013). They also recognized the difficulty of treatment in absence of the individuals that embraced the little South African boy would potentially go through, therefore that’s why it was important to have someone more understanding to assist as a part of this environment.
Impacts on Personal and Professional Cultural Self-Awareness and Relationships
These incidences mentioned above had a great deal of impact on both my personal and professional cultural awareness. It is necessary for a anyone who is providing social services to acknowledge the culture and utilized the training educational information in order to obtain an opinion that is culturally competent and effective. It also became a lesson of utilizing cultural awareness to evade patterns of culture shock, which can end up in confusion and a disapproving professional connection (Stempleski, 2013). These experience required personal reflection to brighten the communication diversely and to be able to include the proceeding technology regarding cultural competency of human service worker. At large, it was an explanation concerning the necessity of increasing one of the four fundamentals of cultural competency which is a talent (Simon L. Dolan, 2015).
Proposal to Improve Sensitivity to Multicultural Issues
Illustrating from the observation research which was done, the community center has average understanding and knowledge in the area of cultural sensitivity. For example, the succeeding model of interdisciplinary and a multicultural methodology will provide a plan recommended for the center. The training sessions given by the associates of the center are given all over different common locations in the United States (Simon L. Dolan, 2015). In this scenario, the specialists only obtain the academic skills and miss the pragmatism and advantage of learning in setting that is multi-cultural, which allows them to exercise the theories they have learned. Another example would be for them to obtain education in other countries to learn other cultures. The specialists could then learn the roles of awareness for those countries lived in while advancing their education.
The second suggestion that can significantly influence the compassion to multicultural problems is the procedures in various work places. Besides saying in the mission statement that they are an organization that widens its touch on the worldwide, the past procedures of the center have been only managed here locally in the United States. The United State have claimed to similar cultures, which is why they use the term "western countries" (Harris, 2013). The associates of the center are certain to have their sensitive, multi-cultural assets limited on a wide-ranged background which is categorized as being the unaffected. The projected plan is to position the procedures outwardly from other western countries thus making various sensitivities of cultural awareness.
In summary, the development discovers the idea of diversity and multiculturalism in connection to the human services field. The topics stated above can be portrayed from the inside and outside assembly of the Culmer Community Action Center. The associates of the center should extend the range of procedures to other countries, with the mission of creating an even more multi-cultural sensitive association. The association should also think about hiring associates who have study abroad to offer a direct practice of the concepts they learned.
(2016). Retrieved from Florida Department of Human services: http://www.state.fl.us/humanservices/services/
Burger, W. R. (2013 ). Human Services in Contemporary America. Cengage Learning.
Deibert, M. (2013 ). The Democratic Republic of Congo: Between Hope and Despair. Zed Books.
Gostin, L. O. (2008 ). Public Health Law. University of California Press.
Harris, R. (2013 ). The Language Myth in Western Culture. Routledge.
Murray, C. (2012 ). Coming Apart: The State of White America. Crown Publishing Group.
Simon L. Dolan, K. M. (2015 ). Cross Cultural Competence: A Field Guide for Developing Global Leaders and Managers. Emerald Group Publishing.
Stempleski, B. T. (2013 ). Cultural Awareness. Oxford University Press.
