Our Approach to Cultural Competence

At Fieldstone Alliance, we believe that the presence of cultural competence within organizations, networks, collaboratives, and alliances enhances nonprofit performance and ultimately, sector effectiveness. Cultural competence is critical with today's changing demographics. More nonprofits find themselves serving an increasingly diverse population in terms of age, gender, religious, spiritual, racial, and ethnic makeup. Developing cultural competence capacity in organizations has become central to ensuring nonprofits can address social inequities, reduce disparities, and accomplish their missions.

In order to reduce these gaps and function effectively, organizations must have the capacity to:

• Provide their services to a broad range of cultural groups beyond the traditionally recognized underserved populations, including new immigrant populations;
• Adapt to increasingly complex cultural and service needs; and
• Respond to the linguistic needs of a growing number of Limited English Proficient (LEP) populations.

Increasing cultural competence capacity in an organization requires attention to several levels—individual (skills, attitudes, values, beliefs), organization (mission, values, policies, practices), and community (history, communication, relationships). These three deeply interrelated levels contribute to an organization’s developmental stage in cultural competence, to its capacity to move along a continuum of transformation, and ultimately, to its strategic thinking and practice around service provision, systemic change, and community involvement.

Over the next two years, we plan to develop products and services that are designed to:

• Enhance organizational capacity to work effectively across cultures
• Build greater organizational effectiveness
• Promote culturally specific nonprofits into the mainstream nonprofit sector
• Enhance cross-cultural collaboration and networking
• Help nonprofits to better fulfill their missions

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