Thursday, August 7th | 9am-4pm
Community Partners Center, Colmar, PA
Challenging the Unseen: Strategies for Unconscious Bias
Recognition of the pitfalls of bias in helping professions is essential for shaping contemporary social services. Many practitioners excel at identifying such biases when they present themselves in culturally specific ways. In this session, we will examine how conscious and unconscious biases intersect with social and cultural forces, such as racism, and explore these relationships to illuminate the sources of biases that may go unrecognized. Additionally, we will share several strategies for revealing an individual's unconscious biases and general techniques for managing their impact on services.
Learning objectives:
Recognize unconscious bias as a core cognitive function
Differentiate bias from prejudice and stigma
Recall at least 3 strategies to address unconscious bias
Intentional Crisis Response
People being served by housing and behavioral health systems are nearly always managing heightened stressors and chronic trauma that can easily overwhelm their ability to cope and can quickly lead to crisis. Given the history, motivations, and specific events that lead to a crisis, each situation a helper may encounter will be unique, and much will be outside of our control. We do have control over our own preparation, internal responses, and traumainformed strategies to support people in de-escalating. This session will explore the spaces before, after, and between the actual de-escalation strategies, as well as provide concrete tools to have in our toolbox. Critically, helpers must understand which strategy is the best fit for the moment and quickly apply it in order to maintain the highest level of safety possible. We will invite attendees to practice applying interventions to a range of examples.
Learning objectives:
Identify at least 3 key steps to prepare for crisis response
Explain 1 new de-escalation tool to apply to a crisis situation
Apply an appropriate de-escalation tool to several example crisis situations
