Clinical Responsibility in Racial Equity and Cultural Inclusivity

Not currently open for registration.

Please sign up for our mailing list to be notified when registration becomes available.

Sign Up for our Mailing List

Delivery: Synchronous Virtual Classroom via Zoom
Series: 5 sessions (Fridays)
Dates: POSTPONED til Fall 2023 (Dates TBD)
Time: 9 a.m.-3:30 p.m. ET (1 hour lunch break)

Instructors: Laura Hinds, M.S.W., L.C.S.W. and Alison Gerig, M.S.W., L.C.S.W.

Becoming an embodied anti-racist therapist is a lifelong journey. Come deepen this work with us and build a community to support you.

Mission:
The Clinical Responsibility in Racial Equity and Cultural Inclusivity series addresses the challenges in cross-race and same-race clinical practice in the age of antiracism. Cultural humility, anti-oppressive practice, and social justice are values central to the profession of social work. In order to enhance human well-being, we must first understand and dismantle personal biases (unconscious and conscious) and systemic injustices within our practice. 

This program will offer opportunities for clinical reflection, education, and practical experience to support the development of conscious and effective clinicians who are pursuing clinical responsibility in Racial Equity and Social Justice. The series will provide clinical study of the impact of racism and White supremacy on clinical work.  A focus will be to illustrate the connections between healing racial trauma and somatic awareness work in an effort to demonstrate how embodiment practice and presence supports clinical healing around racialized trauma.

This program is appropriate for post-master's level clinical practitioners.

Session One: Decolonizing Mental Health; What It Means and What is Asked of Us ^
Date: Fall 2023 TBD
This foundational course will explore the resulting practice of oversight, dictates, and expectations that result in societies that colonize, and how it appears in clinical practice and mental health norms and expectations. By reflecting on the legacies associated with dominant culture, we can identify themes that result in clinical processes that lessen relevance and efficacy to marginalized and disregarded groups. These realities often reinforce the attributed “non-belief in therapy” on poor and non-White populations, a stance that allows the field to ignore and deny its contribution to unequal access and utilization of mental health services. (5.5 Act 48 and/or Ethics credit)

• Increase understanding of the concepts and definitions of White Supremacy in clinical work and how it fosters the process of colonization in mental health. 
• Increase understanding of the definitions and examples of the colonization process and how that appears in the clinical education and services we offer marginalized communities. 
• Provide insight into how education and orientation to the field has reinforced and perpetuated these challenging realities.
   

Session Two: De-Centering White Supremacy in the Clinical Relationship (Part 1)
Date: Fall 2023 TBD
This course is an intensive workshop for White therapists wanting to address race and explore how White fragility shows up in their therapy work, and for BIPOC Clinicians educated in Primarily White Institutions (PWI’s) who are reflecting on how that affects, conflicts with, and challenges their clinical work as therapists. By doing our personal work first, we become safer and more effective practitioners. This training will offer a framework to lean into these tender places and dive deeper into our own fragility and fears while increasing our capacity and skill in racial equity and cultural inclusion in our clinical work. We will offer a framework that explores where and how we hold internalized oppression in our bodies and how we can operate from these places out of awareness. In this series of workshops, participants will have opportunities to watch and practice embodiment work with instructors as a way of healing from racial trauma both in ourselves and our clients.

• Offer insight into how to apply concepts of "Self as Therapist" and locate oneself in the work with both same race and diverse groups. 
• Increase awareness to one's own racial identity development and how it shows up in session.
• Increase understanding of early race messaging and ways White folx have been oriented to idealize themselves as White therapists and Clinicians of Color have been trained, challenged, and sometimes pressured to adopt white ideals and practices in their clinical work.
   

Session Three: De-Centering White Supremacy in the Clinical Relationship (Part 2)
Date: Fall 2023 TBD
This course will continue the deep dive into the education, supervision, and cultural norms in clinical practice that inadvertently prioritize Whiteness and threaten authentic and healing cross-cultural practice. By continuing the discussion from the previous section, we will increase greater awareness around how we minimize the clinical efficacy of our practice due to failing to examine the impact of colonization and White supremacy on our clients and on our clinical relationship. We will teach you how to undo clinical practices that have been normalized in the field and build on our alternate framework that suggests interventions leading to more authentic healing and liberation.

• Illustrate the impact of dominant culture on clinical goals, expectations, and practice while examining how they affect clinical outcomes for diverse populations.
• Explain the multiple ways in which clinical education, supervision, and continuing education reinforce these ideas and create challenges and dangers in clinical work.
• Connect de-centering white supremacy in the clinical relationship to our personal mandates as providers who work with vulnerable and marginalized populations.
   

Session Four: Tending the Wounds of Racial Trauma ^
Date: Fall 2023 TBD
This conversation will happen in both large and affinity small group format. Focusing on action, language, clinical frameworks and trauma informed practice, this session will offer a deeper discussion regarding altering and augmenting the work with clients around the impact of racial trauma. The focus of this session will be to explore our role, responsibilities, and the types of clinical conundrums that emerge when addressing White supremacy more directly in clinical work. We will examine the wounds caused by racism and devaluation both for clients and clinicians and bridge how these wounds relate to our ethical clinical responsibilities and practice. (5.5 Act 48 credit)

• Describe theoretical frameworks of tending the wounds of racial trauma related to being White in America.
• Describe theoretical frameworks of tending to the wounds of racial trauma for BIPOC people who have be trained to be GEMM's.
• Describe the ways in which breaking with White Solidarity can be agitating and healing for both the clinician and their clients of multiple racial experiences.
   

Session Five:  Immersive Practice Lab for Clinical work in Racial Equity and Cultural Inclusion
Date: Fall 2023 TBD
This session will offer participants space to practice, probe, and question the strategies offered in this series in racial trauma healing. Via demonstration, small group discussion, embodiment practice, “fishbowl” role-plays, and interactive activities, this “Lab” will offer participants spaces to enact the principles, frameworks, and exercises relevant to addressing race within the clinical relationship. Participants will be empowered to discuss their anxieties, strengths, and opportunities inherent in their clinical practice while gaining support and suggestions from the trainers and their peers.

• Practice skills in integrating the previous sessions' concepts and teaching into their practice via role plays, fishbowl activities, "hassle line" experience etc. 
• Be empowered to reflect on their strengths and growing needs related to integrating the aforementioned teaching into their actual practice. 
• Be afforded time to identify their future learning needs, and how they will support their learning and practice going forward.
   

Certificate

The presenters were originally going to create this experience as a certificate program with a Certificate given at the end to display and signal completion. After deeper reflection, they felt like this model would support the belief that a level of mastery could be achieved and subsequently rewarded and displayed as such. This design ultimately supports the very White supremist model the program is attempting to disrupt in clinical practice. The presenters believe that anti-racist work is ongoing and life-long, both professionally and personally. Therefore, while there will not be a formal “Certification” given,  you will be able to share this experience with others, bring the material to your clinical work, practices, and personal life, and continue to reflect and heal personally.

Those who complete the full program of five sessions may request a Certificate of Commemoration after the final session.

Registration | Program Cost | CE Credit

Registration and pre-payment of the certificate program assumes attendance at all sessions. Refunds for sessions not attended will not be granted and can not be applied to other Professional Development programs.

Program Cost: $875 (5 sessions @ $175 per session)

NOTE: A payment-plan option is provided on the registration form. Payment plan option requires payment for two sessions, $350.00. Registrants will be sent a different payment link for succeeding sessions two weeks prior to each session. 

Continuing Education Credit: 5.5 CEUs per session | Full Certificate = 27.5 CEUs | Act 48 Credit where indicated with ^ | Includes 5.5 Ethics CE Credits

Instructors

Laura Hinds, M.S.W., L.C.S.W.,  (she/her/we) is Principal Partner of Hindsight Consulting Group, which provides training and small group interventions for non-profits of diverse foci, and is an instructor at the University of Pennsylvania School of Social Policy and Practice. An alum of Penn's SP2, Laura began her career as a direct practitioner with children, adolescents, and families at The Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia, developing skills in HIV/AIDS specific care needs, case management, and high acuity hospital based social work practice, as well as psychotherapy. Laura is also the Chairperson Emeritus of the State Board of Social Workers, Marriage and Family Therapists and Professional Counselors, and a current Board Member of The Therapy Center of Philadelphia.

Alison Gerig, M.S.W., L.C.S.W., (she/her/hers) - With her roots coming out of the south by way of NYC for graduate school, Alison Gerig has worked in the field of mental health and social justice for over 20 years. She loves working in partnership with other therapists around ideas of social location, privilege/subjugated identities, and how they show up in the therapy field. Using her Gestalt therapy and social justice backgrounds, Alison has spent years providing workshops on how to strengthen therapy healing work through exploring the therapeutic relationship. She was the executive director of Therapy Center of Philadelphia for eleven years where she worked with a Change Team to provide the vision and structure to expand their feminist clinical lens to center transgender- affirming and racially equitable therapy. Building on this ethical imperative, Alison currently supports other executive directors/CEOs, organizations, schools, and foundations around similar culture change work and maintains a private practice.