Second Home, Second Chances: Improving Cultural Competency
I found the presentation on navigating diverse cultural contexts in the workplace and in our personal lives fascinating and relevant to my current ministry position. I direct a nonprofit program called Second Home in the Portland area and along the Oregon Coast. We provide long-term housing for unaccompanied youth experiencing homelessness, so that they can focus on their studies, explore their gifts and talents, graduate from high school, and pursue their goals and dreams for the future. Students receive housing through volunteer home providers, recruited and trained by our staff. It is a long-term, community-based effort to walk with youth through high school and into their next season of work and college. We partner with local school districts who refer unaccompanied students, who are not in the consistent presence of their parents or guardians, to our program for housing. We also collaborate with Oregon Mediation Centers who train mediators to facilitate rental leases and house rules contracts between our youth and home providers.
Approximately half of the students with whom we work are from countries other than the United States, including Korea, Thailand, the Czech Republic, Sudan, Mexico, Nicaragua, Honduras, and Costa Rica. We have also had the privilege of working with interns from Latin American cultures, as well as Rwanda. Our home providers, for the most part, are firmly rooted in American culture. We have recently hired two home provider recruiters to recruit multicultural host homes, so that our youth have diversity of choice when interviewing potential hosts. We have learned quite a lot since our program launch in 2010 about the importance of respecting and acknowledging various cultural practices. We have much learning still to do.
I am intrigued and inspired to use the learnings from Erin Meyer and the Culture Map to apply to our daily Second Home activities. I also am drawn to Karen Ann Tremper’s point, as highlighted in her Intercultural Competency PowerPoint lecture, that we must develop ways to give “equal voice” to the different cultures represented in our work environment and develop effective strategies for inviting people into the conversation, so that all feel valued and seen. There are many ways to apply these practices throughout our Second Home program. One of our main organizational priorities is to listen to students’ goals, concerns and needs and adjust our programmatic policies accordingly. Therefore, for the purpose of this blog, I am concentrating on ways we can better respect the students with whom we work through intercultural competency.
Several years ago, we worked with a young person from Korea. She told me during one of our meetings that she could not bring herself to voice her concerns in her new home with her Second Home hosts, because in her culture, it was not acceptable for young people to disagree with adults. She said, “My head thinks the thoughts, but my mouth will not say them.” We eventually moved this student to a new home that better met her needs, but I wonder what we could have done sooner to respect this student’s perspective and culture and to better hear her “words.” Not only was there an age discrepancy between this student and the adults hosting her, but many layers of cultural understanding that were affecting their living situation. This student came from a culture that approached leadership hierarchically and we were asking her to be an equal player in determining her housing wellness. This was difficult for her. She also came from a high-context culture and was most likely communicating to us in ways other than through words. Perhaps our team missed her messages because we were not good at “reading the air.” When we asked her for her honest and direct feedback on the living situation, she was hesitant to give it, as she was taught in her culture to dole out negative feedback indirectly and to avoid confrontation.
In our program, we invite students to be part of creating the house rules contract for the new living situation they are entering. Our mediators sit down with home providers and students and together, they craft a “house rules guidelines” document. From the perspective of this young person from Korea, that was a tall ask! In her country, decisions are made top-down, not through mutual discussion and consent. This was made especially difficult for this person, as she was working with strangers and in Korea, trust comes through relationship and relationships are built over time. We had the privilege of building a strong relationship with this youth over the two years that she found housing through our program, and she eventually shared her thoughts quite candidly, which was a gift!
We have learned important lessons from this student and from the hundreds of young people we have had the opportunity to accompany over the years. We still have much to learn! In the future, I would like to develop various strategies to improve our contract meetings with our program mediators, students, and home providers. Perhaps we can honor pauses in the conversation while students gather their thoughts and contemplate their answers. Perhaps we can emphasize to students the option of writing down their thoughts and sharing them ahead of time. Caucusing with young people separately from the home providers and then coming together while creating our contracts might be more comfortable for some youth. It might also help students if mediators called upon them to share their ideas, instead of assuming they will speak up on their own if they have something to share. Specifically, as a staff, we could focus on raising awareness around high-context communication, listening to subtleties, and gleaning evaluations from youth who feel uncomfortable giving negative feedback.
Our Second Home team, our partners, and our home providers would greatly benefit from cultural competency training and ongoing conversations on how to apply our learnings to our program. May we remain curious and eager to learn from each student we meet, improve our skills in identifying their cultural norms, and offer them homes that more fully meet their physical, emotional, and spiritual needs. They have many barriers to overcome due to the trauma they have experienced in their short lives. If we can ease their stress and eradicate some of the cultural barriers they encounter, it will be well worth our effort.
About the Author
Jenny Steinbrenner Hale
7 responses to “Second Home, Second Chances: Improving Cultural Competency”
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Jenny, I love your practical application to what we are learning. With the diversity of students you reach, I know this will greatly impact your ministry in a positive way. Thank you for sharing this real life example. I wonder if showing the Erin Meyer video would be a good way to start for your team, partners, and home providers. It is not too long and she is a great speaker. I pray that God continues to bless your ministry.
Thanks, Becca, for your thoughts. I think showing the Erin Meyer video to our staff and home providers is a great idea!
Jenny, I was in awe reading your story about Second Home. The work you, the Second Home staff, and the host home volunteers are doing for the students is more than admirable. Everyone’s lives are positively impacted, and you are changing the students’ lives in many ways.
Based on your post, you have clearly processed Meyer’s The Culture Map and begun thinking of creative ways to improve the program. I agree that subsequent training will help minimize cultural differences, particularly with students who may have never had the opportunity to express an opinion.
Because of the various countries of origin listed that the Second Home students are from, the thought occurred to me that the probability that some of the students may have seen acute poverty.
I did some work a few years ago based on work by Dr. Ruby Payne, an educator. She has written several books to assist communities, educators, social services, health care, businesses, government, and law enforcement agencies in understanding economic diversity. While this goes beyond the cultural differences – it highlights the hidden rules of the class (poverty, middle, and wealth). Her work is quite fascinating, and the possible merging of the two bodies of work (cultural and class differences) would make for a powerful combination and a lot of work! Great job.
Hi Audrey, Thanks so much for mentioning Dr. Ruby Payne’s resources and work. That sounds very helpful! Appreciate your comments.
Dear Jenny,
Thank you for sharing about the work that you do! I loved hearing about Second Home and the various cultural challenges that you have encountered. You were challenged by Karen Tremper to 1) Give equal voice to the different cultures represented and 2) Develop effective strategies for inviting people into the conversation so they are heard and seen. I liked how you came up with ideas to take action. I am curious how you may want to teach/train/mentor your staff in some of these suggestions that you put forward? I am confident that your staff would be open to hearing what you are learning in your doctoral program and implementing your fabulous ideas would be exciting!
Excellent post, Jenny! I am excited to hear how your doctoral studies will continue to impact your work!
Kristy Newport
Jenny,
It was so fun to get a sneak peak into all the work that you are doing. I think I could have a whole zoom to continue to learn about what you do! Excellent post and excellent work girl!
Thanks, Alana, for your comments and your encouragement! I’m excited to learn more about what you are doing, as well! I have continued to think about our conversation as we walked on top of Table Mountain in Cape Town. I am inspired by what you and your team are doing to support the children in Nepal. It is amazing what you can do when God gives you an idea and you move forward on it!
Hoping you are well tonight!