Sample Menu of Workshops
Custom workshops and trainings upon request
Cultural Diversity
Cultural Awareness The relationship with patients can be improved and patient care enhanced when caregivers can bridge the divide between the culture of health care and the beliefs and practices that make up patients’ value systems. These may be based on ethnic heritage, nationality of family origin, age, religion, sexual orientation, disability, or socioeconomic status. Every caregiving encounter provides an opportunity to have a positive effect on patient health. Health care providers can maximize this potential by becoming more culturally aware of their own cultural identity, unconscious bias, and their relationship with cultural differences.
Senti-Pensando (Thinking-Feeling) our Cultural Identity We all have a cultural identity, and it is important that service providers operating within a dominant culture, pay attention to cultural differences, especially when serving diverse populations. The training will be an experiential exploration of one’s own cultural identity through the alternative lenses of the Senti-Pensamiento (Thinking-Feeling) and the Epistemologies of the South, touching on norms, conditioning and privileges that we usually take for granted. This exploration is designed to help service providers enhance cultural competence and cultural humility, by raising awareness about the critical impact of culture on how we see ourselves, others and those we serve. Additionally, it will contribute to understand that so-called “minorities” have values, traditions, experiences and memories that make them who they are, and that need to be recognized as a source of cultural dignity.
Personal Leadership A framework of two principles and six practices designed to increase intercultural competence, P.L. help us stay connected to resilience, inspiration and creativity in the face of the new and unfamiliar—either in personal and professional changes and transitions, and/or when living and working across cultures. It’s an invitation to lead from the inside out, while fully engaged in the experience of leading and collaborating with others. It emphasizes self-reflection, the ability to self-regulate and choose our internal state of being, and use difference as a creative resource for increasing productivity and team effectiveness. It could be used to support personal reflection, interpersonal communication, team-building, and intercultural relationships.
The Art of Caregiving
The Call to Caregiving: The purpose of this class is to facilitate a self-reflection process for caregivers to craft a vision statement of themselves at their highest and best when providing care, for the sake of gaining clarity, inspiration and resiliency. This activity has two component: crafting the vision that expresses one’s deepest values and core beliefs, and an application segment to make sure it is a living vision that would support them in their commitment to show up in that way.
Serving as Healing Presence: Being in service of others in need is different from helping or fixing. Healing presence is the condition of being consciously and compassionately in the present moment with another or with others, believing in and affirming their potential for wholeness, wherever they are in life. Topics include how to be present with others in a supportive way, vulnerability and resilience, boundaries and skills.
The Gift of Compassionate Listening: A compassionate presence is a way of being present for what is happening, joining with things as they are without the need to change anything. It can transform situation, moving from the mind to the heart, from our individual self to connecting with others. Compassionate Listening enables participants to truly listen by opening a deeper capacity to hear within themselves. Participants learn how to bring the inherent skills of embodied awareness, compassionate relationship and supportive presence directly into their listening.
Cultural Diversity in Health Care
Beyond Cultural Competence, Cultural Humility and Compassionate Presence for Caregivers: Cultural competence is the ability to interact effectively with people of various racial, ethnic, socioeconomic, religious and social groups. Working towards cultural competence is an ongoing process, often tackled by learning about the patterns of behavior, beliefs, language, values, and customs of particular groups. Cultural humility involves an ongoing process of self-exploration and self-critique combined with a willingness to learn from others. It means entering a relationship with another person with the intention of honoring their beliefs, customs, and values; acknowledging differences and accepting that person for who they are so. This class will focus on skills and practices to cultivate cultural humility and compassionate presence at the end of life.
Painting the Picture of Cultural Wholeness in Health Care: Explore the role that culture plays in health care, and raise your awareness of the cultural lenses through which you serve your culturally diverse patients and families. Learn about the Iceberg Model of Cultural Wholeness, an intercultural visual thinking tool for self-reflection, healing, and mapping dimensions of service including Competence, Humility and Dignity. Topics covered will be diversity within health care, implicit bias, relationship with cultural differences, and skills for becoming a student of the patient.
Reimagining Social Services. Decolonizing the Service Relationship: Using the Coloniality/Decoloniality framework, this presentation is an invitation to envision paths for redefining social services and transforming the relationship between service providers and the community served. Topics will include the importance of value systems (axiologies) that guide decision-making, contrasting “progress” versus “care”; issues of culture, cultural identity and cultural differences; and a model of Cultural Wholeness, mapping dimensions of competence, humility and dignity that could help to think strategies for decolonizing our minds and society. This presentation aims to contribute with new language to help us “be more effective hospice workers to the dying culture and midwives to the new one.”
End of Life Care
Advance Care Planning: Advance care planning is about making decisions about the care a person would want to receive if unable to speak for oneself. Decisions about end-of-life care are deeply personal, and are based on one’s values and beliefs. Conversations that focus on personal wishes and beliefs will relieve loved ones and healthcare providers of the need to guess what the patient would want. Topics include the importance of discussing medical decisions in advance, understanding treatment options and goals of care, personal values and choices at the end of life, and choosing a health care agent.
End of Life and Hospice Services: For many seriously ill patients, hospice and palliative care offers a more dignified and comfortable alternative to spending your final months in the impersonal environment of a hospital. Palliative medicine helps patients manage pain and symptoms while hospice care provides special care to improve quality of life for both the patient and their family. Topics include the hospice philosophy and services, changes and needs of terminally-ill patients and families, and the importance of self-care for the caregivers.
Grief Education for Those in Caring Relationships: Loss is what we feel when we lose something or somebody we love. For patients, it may mean the loss of health, independence, and social roles. Even though they are on a personal grief journey, their grief may affect caregivers as well. It is important to learn how grief affects the individual and the family, as well as ways in which caregivers can support those in grief while taking care of themselves.
Caring for Self: One of the most important—but often forgotten—tasks for caregivers is caring for themselves. A caregiver’s physical, emotional, and mental health is vital to the well-being of the person whom they care for and the quality of the care they provide. To be a good caregiver, you must be good to yourself. Without adequate help and support, the stress of caregiving leaves the caregiver vulnerable to a wide range of physical and emotional problems, ranging from heart disease to depression. This class will provide a simple process for raising awareness about the impact of caregiving, naming stress reactions, identifying simple strategies for self-care and ways of reaching out for support.