Building resilient communities through culturally dynamic partnerships

Crisis in society can be caused by a number of social, political, environmental and economic factors including dramatic and immediate ones like the assassination of national leaders or the 9/11 attacks in the United States, or they could be longer term ones like the Global Financial Crisis. They all have significant effects in terms of intense distress within individuals and communities. They also bring out the best and the worst in human responses. In particular, crises that can be directly or indirectly blamed on human agency are very prone to be turned into issues of racism and racist action across cultures and affect community resilience. Currently, cultural competence is a widely used method of developing the ability of people to manage inter-cultural relations, including issues of racism-related crisis. This paper will draw on the literature and research of cultural competency to argue that, while this method has some areas of strength, it also has some major failings such as the use of inappropriate terminology, lack of acknowledgement of the issues of power and racism, lack of cultural safety and the lack of acknowledgement of the dynamic nature of cultures. In this paper, the principles towards developing an alternative framework of Culturally Dynamic Partnerships (CDP) will be presented as a way towards enabling communities to deal with racism-related crises. This model would incorporate some of the most effective aspects of older models of cultural competence and cultural safety while going beyond some of the negative issues inherent in them