Apr 19, 2023 2 min read

Cultural humility is the notion for a long time in this world of training people to work with populations. 

In my own life, there was always this complexity of you’re from here, but you’re not. People always assumed I was foreign until I proved otherwise. I think that notion of how we approach people and how we make them feel welcome has been central to my own life. 

As a social worker so much of our work is trying to help people to be comfortable through helping processes whether that through therapy for themselves for their child, a veteran returning from war, whatever its is that they need to get themselves whole again. 

Our group focuses on helping businesses and entities do that in their own practices to be more welcoming and be more open to all people no matter who they are, no matter where they come from, no matter what their trauma is and their background. 

All of this do this work in different ways based on our identities some of us have immigrant parents some of us are immigrants.

Each of us came from this from a different angle and we realized that together we have more ability to have all of the conversations. that’s why we started this group as a collaborative.

Seven members, 6 affiliated with Penn West.

One a student, one an adjunct.     

We have different aspects to our selves that allow us to be more connectible, relatable to the populations we’re serving

Worked with jefferson Hospital, AHN. 

Cultural humility is understanding it’s your experience that makes you see the world the way you do. I can teach you about yourself and what your biases are and how you came to those biases through your own experience and how to be more humble about knowing yourself. We can’t really know other people until we know ourself.

Jefferson Hospital Opening the new emergency department hired me to do a training to help their emergency personnel better understand the bhutanese population that has resettled in that area.

Once they knew that story it really changed their perception first time these people were able to be free somewhere. 

They didn’t know that story. Helped those in the ED better understand some of the ailments people were coming in with.