These guidelines or indicators have been designed to raise awareness and to stimulate thinking about the important role that culture plays in successful prevention programs and activities. They should be expanded and tailored to your prevention program or organization.

Organizations that are engaged in prevention activities must often balance money, staff, and time. Following guidelines such as these may seem too expensive and time consuming. These problems may not be easy to solve and may require dedicated and creative solutions. But it is well worth the effort because a culturally competent program and organization will help to create strong and sound prevention efforts.

Experience or Track Record of Involvement With the Target Audience

The sponsoring organization should have a documented history of positive programmatic involvement with the population or community to be served. The organization's staff, its board, and volunteers should have a history of involvement with the target population or community to be addressed that is verifiable by the general cultural group and by the specific community to be served.

Training and Staffing

The staff of the organization should have training in cultural sensitivity and in specific cultural patterns of the community proposed for services. Staff should be identified who are prepared to train and translate the community cultural patterns to other staff members.

There should be clear cultural objectives for staff and for staff development. These objectives can be demonstrated by a staff training plan that:

• Increases and/or maintains the cultural competency of staff members

• Clearly articulates standards for cultural competency, including credibility in hiring practices, and calls for periodic evaluations and demonstration of the cultural and community-specific experience of staff members.

Emphasis should be placed on staffing the initiative with people who are familiar with, or who are themselves members of, the community to be served.

Community Representation

The community targeted to receive services should be a planned participant in all phases of program design. There should be an established mechanism to provide members of the target group with opportunities to influence and help shape the program's proposed activities and interventions. A community advisory council or board of directors of the organization (with legitimate and working agreements) with decision-making authority should be established to affect the course and direction of the proposed program. Members of the targeted cultural group should be represented on the advisory council and organizational board of directors. The procedures for making contributions or changes to the policies and procedures of the project should be described and made known to all parties.

Language

If an organization is providing services to a multilinguistic population, there should be multilinguistic resources, including use of skilled bilingual and bicultural translators whenever a significant percentage of the target community is more comfortable with a language other than English. There should be printed and audiovisual materials sufficient for the proposed program. If translations from standard English to another language are to be used, the translation should be done by individuals who know the nuances of the language as well as the formal structure. All translations should be carefully pretested with the target audience.

Materials

It should be demonstrated that audiovisual materials, PSA's, training guides, print materials, and other materials to be used in the program are culturally appropriate or will be made culturally consistent with the community to be served. Pretesting with the target audience and gatekeepers should provide feedback from community representatives about the cultural appropriateness of the materials under development.

Evaluation

Program evaluation methods and instruments should be consistent with the cultural norms of the group or groups being served. There should be a rationale for the use of the evaluation instruments that are chosen, including a discussion of the validity of the instruments in terms of the culture of the specific group or groups targeted for interventions. If the instruments have been imported from another project using a different cultural group, there should be adequate evaluation and/or revision of the instruments so that they are now demonstrably culturally specific to the target group(s). The evaluators should be sensitized to the culture and familiar with the culture whenever possible and practical.

Implementation

There should be objective evidence/indicators that the organization understands the cultural aspects of the community that will contribute to the program's success and knows how to recognize and avoid pitfalls.