Culture Counts: A Guide to Best Practices for Developing Health Promotion Initiatives in Mental Health and Substance Use with Ethnocultural Communities

As the previous examples show, assumptions can create barriers between health promotion initiatives and ethnocultural communities. For any health promotion initiative to work, a full understanding of its intended audience is needed. To understand ethnocultural communities, you need to work directly with them. Support for your health promotion initiative will grow if the community participates in its development and implementation.

Be aware of your own culture and way of seeing things

We all tend to view things through our own cultural lens. The way we view things is also affected by our individual experiences, education, and training. Simply being aware of this tendency is a good start to building bridges with ethnocultural communities.

Some more steps you can take to enhance your work with people of different cultures:

• put aside assumptions
• be flexible
• listen more, talk less
• when problems arise, rather than make judgments, recognize the possibility of misunderstanding.

To learn more about cross-cultural communication:

• Toward a More Perfect Union in an Age of Diversity: A Guide to Building Stronger Communities through Public Dialogue: “Working on Common Cross-Cultural Communication Challenges” (USA)
• Health Canada: “‘Certain Circumstances’ Issues in Equity and Responsiveness in Access to Health Care in Canada—Part IV Toward Cultural Competence.”
• National Center for Cultural Competence: “Conceptual Frameworks/Models/Guiding values” (USA)
• Kleinman A, Benson P (2006) “Anthropology in the clinic: The problem of cultural competency and how to fix it.” PLoS Med 3(10): e294. DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0030294 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pmed.0030294.

Partner with community-based agencies

In many ways, creating health promotion initiatives with ethnocultural communities is no different from creating them with other specific communities and audiences. One major difference, however, is language. Many people in ethnocultural communities do not speak either official language or simply feel more at ease communicating in their own language, especially when it comes to sensitive issues such as mental health and substance use problems.

If you do not speak the community’s language, it is going to be difficult to do the research and community consultation needed to create the initiative. One way around this difficulty is to partner with one or more agencies already established in the community. The staff in community-based agencies tend to understand both the mainstream culture and their community’s culture. They can therefore act as a bridge between you and the community.

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