Webinar: Substance misuse prevention with Hispanic and Latino communities in the southeast: What cultural dynamics are at play?

The Southeast PTTC in collaboration with the National Hispanic & Latino PTTC offers this training for prevention practitioners in HHS Region 4: AL, FL, GA, KY, MI, NC, SC and TN.  This training, offered in response to a need identified by Region 4 stakeholders, will focus on the relationship between our personal and professional cultural backgrounds and those of people whose historical roots are embedded in the expansion of Spain, once a powerful global empire. Do people in this diaspora have particular views, beliefs, and biases about substance misuse?  Are they different than ours? Dr. Jana Spalding will explore and encourage deeply reflective questions such as--from what cultural framework has the field of prevention developed? What assumptions, unspoken beliefs, and biases exist in the field of prevention? How can we ever know how to work with people whose ways of being in the world are different from ours? How can we ever understand, much less find common ground with, people from another culture in order to prevent substance misuse and promote health?

Learning Objectives:

1. Challenge prevention professionals to reflect on their own personal and professional cultural assumptions and biases
2. Consider the cultural context from which the field of prevention in the US has emerged and its relevancy to people and groups from other cultural backgrounds
3. Motivate prevention professionals to pursue ways to increase their own cultural humility: understanding their own cultural makeup first, so as to respectfully relate to people of different cultures different 
4. Understand that the challenge is not just to teach our concepts and practices of prevention, but to assist – even as we work on it ourselves -- to acquire skills to adapt to the changing cultural contexts in which we all find ourselves