Recruitment and Retention Strategies for Culturally Specific Behavioral Health Staff
This summer, the Northwest ATTC is hosting a 3-part series on Innovative and Successful Approaches to Staff Recruitment and Retention.
Part 2: Recruitment and Retention Strategies for Culturally Specific Behavioral Health Staff
The current behavioral health workforce emergency is nothing new in the culturally and linguistically specific communities in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. Traditional recruitment strategies by dominant culture organizations often fail due to a variety of systemic and cultural barriers that are largely invisible to the established behavioral health systems. Executive Directors Fernando Peña with NW Instituto Latino and Jerrod Murray with Painted Horse Recovery operate culturally specific SUD Recovery Community Organizations that despite the ongoing behavioral health workforce emergency are fully staffed with culturally and linguistically specific staff and routinely have multiple applicants for each open position as one becomes available. In this session, Jerrod and Fernando will share their understanding of the systemic barriers that impact Indigenous and Latinx communities when it comes to the behavioral health workforce. And will share some strategies that they have used to recruit, retain and support their respective teams.