Assess staff's specific knowledge about people of color. This is only a beginning. The process of becoming culturally competent is a long-term. Upon taking the aforementioned inventory. For centuries, people of color have been victims of institutional racism whereby the agencies that were designed to help people of color were actually contributing to cultural genocide.
Cultural competency exists on a continuum from being culturally destructive to culturally competent.
It is critical that our programs strive toward cultural competency because there are people of color in our communities in need of accessing our services. We need to remove the barriers and to embrace the differences.