Caring Across Communities Collaborative
Funded by a grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation

CACC Main Page | 2009-10 Workshops | Structured Dialogues | Community Conversations

Community Conversations

The Caring Across Communities (CAC) Steering Committee designed a community conversation format to gather information about the issues facing refugee and immigrant children and their families.  The CAC engaged and empowered the Community Counseling Center’s multicultural clinical team and the Multilingual and Multicultural Center’s parent outreach support staff to facilitate conversations within the Khmer, Serbian, Somali, Spanish, and Sudanese communities.  Each facilitator decided what would best support the discussion process including culturally specific foods to open the conversations and to create safety, trust and connections within the community groups. Empowering the community leaders empowered their respective communities to gather with a sense of purpose, trust and understanding of the project goals.

In summary, the outgrowth of the community conversations project is a deeper appreciation of the essential need to build empowerment models that support, nourish, honor and encourage the expression of the multiple complex realties that multicultural families face with respect to their conflictual past as well as their present acculturation process and their imagined future.

The outreach process needs to move both ways.  As community members build more support and trust, they actually are more empowered to offer their insights and understandings for collaboration within the dominant culture. 

The outgrowth of the empowerment process is ultimately to produce change in the prevention programs as well as the collaborative healing process coordinated between the mental health provider and the cultural specialist.  Making cultural specific rituals and practices the first choice in healing practices ensures a working collaboration that can begin to change the access that multicultural families have to mental health services.