Cultural Competence in Child Welfare: What Is It? How Do We Achieve It? What Happens Without It?

Presents a model for achieving cultural competence in child welfare practice. The model’s underlying assumption is that children and families should receive health care and psychosocial services that are culturally acceptable and that support the integrity and strengths of their culture. Moreover, child welfare practitioners are obliged to provide culturally congruent interventions if they actually are to preserve the bests interests of children, family, and communities. A review of the literature suggests that commitment to cultural competence requires an advanced level of activity as well as a comprehensive model for achieving goals. Such a model assumes enlightened consciousness, which involves genuine acceptance of cultural differences; a grounded knowledge base, which embraces a wide range of sources of information from other disciplines; and cumulative skill proficiency, which means that new skills need to be practiced consistently and refined as necessary. The process of becoming culturallycompetent begins with a forthright assessment of one’s level of functioning with culturally different others. Also contains a series of questions whereby practitioners can assess their level of commitment to cultural competence.