Cultural Diversity and Values

By:Janae S.

         Cultural diversity is the existence of a variety of cultural or ethnic groups within a society. But if we breakdown the definition culture is a group of people as well as their behaviors, beliefs, values, and the symbols they accept, diversity is a range of different things. Culture diversity is a strong part of people’s lives, it influences their views, their humor, their hope and many more. Its important to remember that everyone has a different viewpoint and role when it comes to cultural.

Approximately 50% of the adolescents advocates work with minority youths. Many of our youths and families that we work with have a low-economic status. One important part of being an advocate is understanding and respecting the different racial and cultural experiences of our youth as well was the families within the program. Apart of the adolescent diversion project they stress the importance of each youth’s individuality. During the intervention process we tend to face two important challenges that involves the youth dealing with values and cultural diversity.

Understanding Values:

Everything that we do, every decision we make is basically based on our beliefs, attitudes, and values. Throughout the program advocates have noticed that values includes interactions with the youth. As an advocate it’s very serious to become more aware of the values we hold, the type of values they are, and to assess them if they are values we want to keep. They are a major part of who we are and they are extremely important to us. 

There are some values that are more strongly than other values, and some values we tend to believe they are the truth to us. When working with values a lot of people don't remember that our truths are not necessarily anyone else’s truth. When experiencinga value there may be some conflict, people would become very defensive, angry, or judgmental. These experiences can cause the relationship between your youth and advocates relationship to breakdown in communication.  

Sources:

http://www.ethnoconnect.com/articles/1-what-is-cultural-diversity
http://ctb.ku.edu/en/table-of-contents/culture/cultural-competence/culture-and-diversity/mainImages:

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