BC Federation of Foster Parent Associations
2019 AGM
Harrison Hot Springs
Equity, Diversity & Inclusion (EDI) Training
October 4, 2019
This dynamic and interactive program lays the groundwork for fostering a truly inclusive workplace, community or home, offering practical learning and tools around Inclusive Literacy, Disrupting Unconscious Bias, Intercultural Essentials, and Fostering a Robust Cultural Identity in youth. This is an excellent opportunity for foster parents to acquire a technical understanding of inclusion, confront personal bias, and gain meaningful insight to the challenges of determining one’s cultural identity.
10-minute breaks will be provided between each module.
Program
Module 1
Inclusion Literacy & Six Vital Traits for Inclusive and Healthy Workplaces
Seminar/Workshop (90 minutes)
Inclusive parenting is the key to optimizing psychological health and safety. The capacity for foster parents to model inclusive attitudes, language and behaviors is the litmus test of any foster family’s commitment towards social inclusion. Failure to demonstrate inclusivity within any home drives youth away, harbours discrimination, normalizes inequity and has a direct impact on the mental health of youth in foster care. This interactive seminar explores the most recent report by Deloitte on when people feel included, and provides a research-based framework around inclusive foster parenting.
Module 2
Intro to Confronting Unconscious Bias
Seminar (90 min)
Understanding what implicit bias is and how it impacts our behaviour is key to fostering more inclusive and intercultural environments work and home. Bias affects how we interact with youth, who we give opportunities to, and how we assess youth behaviour. The workshop will further explore the impact of the following biases (below) and how they impact our day-to-day behaviour (sometimes resulting in micro-aggressions):
Affinity bias;
Confirmation bias;
Social comparison bias;
Performance bias; and
Attribution error.
This session will also offer strategies for interrupting bias that do not require the participants to recognize their own biases in the heat of the moment.
Please see the following link for the pre-work instructions:
Module 3
From Intercultural Leadership to Fostering a Forgiving Space
Seminar/Workshop (90 minutes)
This engaging and interactive module provides a frank conversation about the complex difficulties of parenting in a multicultural family environment, the intercultural afterthought, and how to manage profound cultural differences across family members. This module covers:
The impact of cultural differences;
The stages of personal change that must occur to formalize an intercultural mindset;
Developing Intercultural Fluency;
Whose responsibility is it to adapt; and
Overcoming the fear of saying the wrong thing.
Module 4:
Addressing Systemic Barriers to Foster Parent Recruitment
Workshop (90 minutes)
This hand-on workshop will give participants an opportunity to address the misconceptions in the public around bring a foster parent, and also give space to map the process of becoming a foster parent, so as to determine where along the journey potential foster parents face challenges.