4.1 Chapter Overview
As part of your professional training, you need to develop competence in many areas of your life, including the ability to work effectively across differences. You have chosen this profession because you like to be with people and attend to the diverse needs they cannot fulfill without help. Your internship experience will give you the chance to see how diversity, equity, and inclusion are addressed in the field.
The focus of this chapter is to address issues using an equity lens. The history of human services has numerous examples of policies and procedures that did not appropriately respect the diversity of clients. One of these examples is the concept of the “friendly visitor” of the late 1800s, who visited the homes of the needy to decide which of them were deserving of assistance. The early charity organizations of the same era included some that were focused more on efficiency than actual assistance (Global Institute of Social Work, 2022). Working across difference means acknowledging the diverse backgrounds and experiences of workers and clients and providing services in a manner that focuses on equity and inclusion. Your internship will be an important building block in your understanding of how to use your own equity lens to provide the most respectful and responsive services possible.
Learning Objectives
After reading this chapter, you will be able to do the following:
- Apply DEI within a variety of field settings.
- Distinguish the importance and value of using an equity lens within a variety of field settings.
- Manage challenges presented by issues of difference between yourself, your agency, and/or your clients.
Preview of Key Terms
- Cultural humility: Approaching clients with respect and curiosity regarding differences in cultural background and/or practices.
- Culture: The shared beliefs, customs, and rituals of a group of people.
- Diversity: The practice or quality of including or involving people from a range of different social and ethnic backgrounds and of different genders, sexual orientations, etc. that may or may not intersect with each other.
- Equity: The quality of being fair and impartial and providing equitable access to different perspectives, lenses, and resources to all students.
- Equity lens: A way of looking at and acting on issues of justice to ensure that outcomes in the conditions of well-being are improved for marginalized groups, lifting outcomes for all.
- Implicit bias: Attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, decisions, and actions in an unconscious manner.
- Inclusion: The practice or quality of providing equal access to opportunities and resources for people who might otherwise be systemically excluded or marginalized, such as those who have physical or mental disabilities and members of other minoritized groups.
- Inequity: A difference in the distribution or allocation of a resource between groups.
- Intersectionality: inequalities produced by simultaneous and in