Isadora Del Vecchio Photo
Al Gimm, Amos Smith, Larry Stewart and Greg Walton.
In honor of National Community Action Month, the Community Action Agency of New Haven (CAANH) celebrated its second annual Diversity Day: a day of laughter, bonding and learning for everyone.
The promise of community action is to change peoples’ lives and improve our community. Community Action Month is one way for us to focus on our role in the community, which is to offer pathways to prosperity to those in poverty in the greater New Haven area.
Our agency programs include energy assistance, weatherization, food pantry, diaper bank, SMART Women, Manage Your Future, medical transportation for Cornell Scott Hill Health Center patients, and Operation Fuel.
The Thailand display.
Throughout Diversity Day, we focused on cultural competency and expanding cross-cultural knowledge — themes important to the operation of CAANH. Diversity Day is designed as an agency-wide team building effort.
CAANH staff are divided into eight distinct groups that represent different countries. Each group is responsible for verbal and visual presentations that address the life, culture and language of the people.
In addition to these activities, special foods from each country are offered. This year, food included lamb stew from Ghana and Haitian beet salad. There was also the staff’s favorite: red velvet cake from the American South.
Our keynote speaker, Greg Walton, is a recently retired organizational project manager from the UConn School of Social Work. His relevant coursework while at UConn was teaching classes in cultural competence. His lecture focused on awareness regarding the assumptions we make about our clients, their families and each other.
Walton advised us to continually use opportunities such as Diversity Day to expand knowledge of cross-cultural community resources. His lecture posed the question, why is cultural competence relevant to a human services organization?
A presentation on Japan.
One of our main objectives is to meet human needs using an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural approach to service delivery. Staff members of CAANH are often called on to intervene with a client during crisis, and at other times, to prevent and lessen the impact if existing problems with the goal of improving quality of life and self-sufficiency.
In order to do this, we maintain a high level of cultural competencies in regards to ethnicity, race, economic conditions, age, sexual orientation, and “thought leadership.”
According to CAANH President and CEO Amos L. Smith, “speakers like Greg Walton ensure that we maintain a staff that is competent in all areas that are important to our constituents.”
