Since our inception, RSN’s purpose has been to interrupt the systemic barriers that youth and their families experience accessing mental health and substance use services: RSN is committed “to achieving meaningful diversity and inclusion and combating bias and discrimination, including structural and systemic racism, anti-blackness within the organization, and non-profit industrial complex. . . . RSN affirms the value and dignity of all people, especially those who embody identities that have been historically marginalized and intentionally exploited. RSN strives to extend full equality, inclusion and acceptance to its clients, volunteers, board members, staff, community partners, and vendors.”
To live into these values, RSN engaged with El Futuro’s Advancing Latine Mental Health Access (ALMA) program to expand our capacity to provide culturally responsive care and linguistic access using the Culturally and Linguistically Appropriate Services (CLAS) Standards as our benchmarks. CLAS standards reflect multiple ways that organizations provide “effective, equitable, understandable, and respectful quality care and services that are responsive to diverse cultural health beliefs and practices, preferred languages, health literacy, and other communication needs” (National Standards, 2016). The ALMA program created a nonjudgmental space for RSN to have brave conversations, grow, and reflect on progress.
At the end of March, RSN completed an initial assessment and in early April, co-designed a plan with six areas of focus.
- Integrating questions about culture and language into evaluation to understand participants’ experiences related to their identities.
- Revising the participant agreement to include a culturally responsive conflict & grievance process.
- Revising pieces of the website to better inform Spanish speaking parents and participants about RSN.
- Developing a plan around language justice–assessing language skills of Spanish speakers, selection and appropriate use of interpreters and translators, developing the capacity to support Spanish speaking recovery coaches.
- Planning for initial and ongoing training of board members, staff, mentors, and perhaps participants around diversity, equity, and inclusion.
- Communication about progress on providing culturally and linguistically appropriate services.
Three months into this work, RSN has made significant progress on each of its goals. We revised our evaluations to better capture feedback on how race, ethnicity, language, culture and identities may be mediating the experience of participants. We added language to our participant agreement and created protocols to respond to participant experiences of disrespect, discrimination, or abuse. Although we hope that we never need to use these protocols, we are glad to have a plan in place that assures youth and their families that we want to know when things need improvement. RSN also created an En Español section on our website to communicate key information to Spanish speakers and has plans for assessing Spanish speaking mentor program candidates skills. We had key elements of our program materials translated into Spanish, Arabic and Karen and are also supporting staff in developing Spanish language proficiency..
To ensure that the board, staff, mentors and perhaps even participants have the tools to live up to RSN’s commitment, we have compiled training options and information about how to use the Circle Process to support deep reflection on combating bias and discrimination with plans to incorporate aspects of this training into our board, staff and mentor orientations to ensure that we have a shared language around dismantling systems of oppression. We are committed to going beyond virtue signaling with a single moment of training and plan to hold quarterly opportunities to continue learning together.
We believe that in order to grow as an anti-racist organization we need to acknowledge our strengths as well as our shortcomings. We are proud to share with you our process, the steps we’ve taken, and look forward to continued sharing as we strive to live into our values.