Cultural Competence in Jerusalem Municipality

What do you do when there’s an emergency late at night that requires welfare services? This is exactly what the on-call workers of the Jerusalem Municipality’s Welfare Department are for. The on-call workers, who are all social workers, respond to a multitude of incidents, including: delivering difficult news, domestic violence cases, treating youth who have run away, and answering emergency telephone calls on various issues. About 150 on-call workers took part in cultural competency workshops via Zoom – some 100 on-call workers (in three workshops at the end of June) who work in West Jerusalem, and another about 50 workers who provide services in East Jerusalem, in a special workshop which took place on July 8 delivered in Arabic for drives of the east of the city (on 8.7.21).

Workshop for on-call workers

During the workshops participants raised inter-cultural challenges they faced when they’re on-call, which is different than their everyday work – lack of familiarity with the callers and their cultural characteristics; the rapid transitioning between the vastly different cultures and backgrounds of callers; the sometimes-opposing approaches between welfare and community services; dealing with callers’ sometimes first encounters with welfare services; the objections that arise on the background of cultural perceptions versus the authority of the social worker to carry out legal orders, and more.

One on-call worker told that she had to inform an ultra-Orthodox family about the mother’s death on Friday afternoon, right before the Sabbath. She was surprised with the family’s preoccupation with burying the mother as quickly as possible, and that they weren’t open to her attempts at grief support. Another on-call worker recounted the time that she tried to move an elderly man living in unfit conditions to a shelter, and how there was significant opposition from the family.

Participants were given tools to enable them to have a culturally competent and effective encounter: to think before the encounter what cultural sensitivities they may encounter and what is the effective response to those sensitivities and tools for deepening intercultural dialogue that helps facilitate effective and sensitive care.

Two questions – helping social workers be culturally competent

This is the first workshop we’ve led for on-call workers. We hope that future workshops will preserve and strengthen this knowledge and skills.

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation for their ongoing support of Cultural Competence in Jerusalem!

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:

1. What are the possible interpretations? What possible cultural mores does it touch on?
2. Have you experienced a similar incident before? How did you act then?
3. 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.

On Tuesday, November 5, we held a special evening for Health Care Rights Volunteers, which was organized by the Community Services Department of the Jerusalem Municipality, with an emphasis on cultural Competency.

The volunteers come from various organizations, such as Santé Israël‘s Bikur Olim project, Kivunim from Hadassah Hospital, the Segula unit at Sha’are Zedek Medical Center, and more, listened to a lecture from our own Aliza Shabo-Hayut, who described the experience of a fictitious immigrant who encounters cultural barriers everywhere – in the education system, on public transport, at the National Insurance Institute and in the hospital. She also described the tools for cultural competence among volunteers are extremely important in helping immigrants and those from different cultures obtain their health rights and navigate the Israeli health system. The lecture received excellent responses and the volunteers noted the importance of the topic and the contribution of the lecture to their work.

Aliza speaking to volunteers

After the lecture specific complex inter-cultural situations were demonstrated through playback theater.

Volunteers night – show time

The choice of cultural competency as the main theme of a special evening recognizing volunteers is part of the process of assimilating cultural competence in the municipal Community Services Department that we’ve been leading in recent years.

Volunteers night – playback time

Many thanks to Sarit Lipkin Wolf from the Community Services Department, for organizing the evening, and to Marie Avigad, coordinator of Sante Israel, who was part of the steering committee for the evening and who brought the subject to the fore. And of course, many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation, for its continued support of Cultural Competency over the past decade.

Here’s the post from the Sante Israel Facebook page (in Hebrew and French):

Many thanks to the Pharmadom Foundation for its continued support of Santé Israël over the years, and to the Jerusalem Foundation for its support to the JICC cultural competence program.

Why do Arab residents from East Jerusalem utilize volunteer rights centers in West Jerusalem? What’s the difference between a Haredi person’s usage of B’Ezrat Hashem (With God’s help) or Bli Neder (God willing)? And how would you deal with these questions if faced with a real-life situation?

Listening to a very interesting lecture

Some 30 volunteers who work in the Municipality’s rights realization centers from throughout the city participated in introduction to cultural competency workshops resented by our Director of the Cultural Competency Desk, Orna Shani, on April 30.  This workshop focused not on the specific answers to these questions, but rather on how to handle the range of cultures and ethnicities that are served by the municipal rights centers. Rights centers are operated by the municipal welfare department, part of the Social Services Division of the Jerusalem Municipality that is undergoing a process of becoming culturally competent. You can read more about this process here and here.

The volunteers learned about the principles of cultural competency, about different meanings of common phrases that often seem to mean the same thing, about what to do when a volunteer has pre-conceived notions about a particular group of people, the different types of requests from different types of people, and more. All in a process to help more of Jerusalem’s diverse populations gain access to rights guaranteed them by law.

Many thanks to the Jerusalem Foundation for its ongoing support of Cultural Competency in Jerusalem.