We’re continuing our efforts to assimilate cultural competence in the municipal welfare department in Jerusalem. We’re concentrating on the western region of Jerusalem, which covers a large and diverse area – from Haredi Har Nof and Bayit Vagan to Beit Hakerem, which is considered a secular neighborhood, to Kiryat Hayovel, which includes a highly diverse population of Haredim and secular communities, to the city center, which also includes a broad spectrum of communities, including asylum seekers from Sudan and Eritrea.
The Forum facilitatorד at the JICC
The meetings included discussions with the regional director. She is in charge of the welfare offices, the rehabilitation centers, and the training centers. She spoke about the activities of the different professional forums. At each monthly meeting, all professionals from the different neighborhoods meet to discuss the same issue. For example, there are forums that deal with aging, violence, families, authority, eligibility, youth, disabilities and more …
Each forum is accompanied by the forum coordinator and a facilitator, both of them social workers at one of the regional offices. At these meetings, they raise professional dilemmas related to their meetings with clients and the other employees in the region. We decided that this is an ideal forum to advance cultural competency – if each session would also include intercultural aspects that emerging from the cases they bring up they could better assimilate concepts of cultural competency in the different welfare offices and associated centers.
talking about cultural competence with the social workers
The first phase of the process was conducted at the Jerusalem Intercultural Center. At that meeting, held on December 22, 19, all forums and forum coordinators were given tools to examine case studies, raised by the participants from different forums, from a cultural competence standpoint. One of the tools is the three-question model developed at the JICC:
- What are the possible interpretations? What possible cultural mores does it touch on?
- Have you experienced a similar incident before? How did you act then?
- What would you suggest to do at the event presented?
Since then, we’ve worked with them in a number of steps. The second step was work with the forums themselves. Preparatory meetings were held with the director and facilitator of the forum in which they design a meeting with joint facilitation. The third stage is the meeting with the forum itself. So far, we have met with the Authority Forum – employees of the Welfare Department, who are not social workers and who accompany and assist families in various areas. We spoke with them about their ability to be go-betweens, providing social workers with important cultural information on the one hand and those requesting assistance on the other. Another meeting was held with the Eligibility Workers Forum, which is responsible for subsidizing activities and providing assistance to eligible offices. One of the issues raised in the meeting was how to deal with a person who comes thinking that he deserves assistance (after receiving incorrect information from his friends), but in fact is not eligible according to the guidelines, and how our culture meets (and deals with) that of the person who is asking for assistance. Additional meetings have been scheduled with the Social Workers for the Elderly Forum, and the Family Social Workers Forum.
Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation for their continued support of cultural competency in Jerusalem since its inception over a decade ago.
