Anchors: CONFIDENTIAL CULTURAL TROUBLESHOOTING
CHUM offers holistic, evidence-based workplace mediation for individual cultural conflicts arising between staff and between staff and their clients, patients, students, etc. We also offer confidential one-on-one consultations, what we call “cultural therapy”. Called Anchors, these two programs help organizations that are dealing with specific issues with a specific person/population in their professional spaces. The workplace mediation program sees our trained staff step in to help directly mediate conflicts arising due to cultural and racial/ethnic differences (and other social differences, including those pertaining to one’s gender and sexual identity, religion, politics, etc). As part of this effort, we speak with involved parties within the organization and work towards generating healing through non-judgmental, culturally-tailored conflict resolution practices. In contrast, our cultural therapy sessions are intimate one-on-one consultations. Each cultural consultation session lasts 30 minutes and can be continuously scheduled. Both programs use principles and approaches from our restorative justice framework.
What can you expect in an Anchors sessions? Our Anchors focus on the issue of positionality (i.e., how you are positioned relative to someone who’s different from you in terms of your/their race, class, power, etc.). Have you ever heard the expression “meet them where they’re at”? In short, this means you should adjust and adapt your engagement approaches to align with what people are used to and to what they can handle given their readiness. This is no doubt important, but meeting someone where they’re at is easier said than done. More to the point, we spend a lot of time as practitioners thinking about where our clients, patients, partners, students, etc., are at… but not nearly enough time thinking about where we’re at! Our Anchors programs get us thinking about this, as part of our Flexible Anchor Method (FAM). FAM “anchors” equity as the ultimate end-goal, regardless of where you’re starting out in your journey and how prepared you are… or how prepared you think you are. (And there is a difference!)
CHUM’s Anchors program operates from the perspective that you have the capacity to improve your relationships with people who are different from you and meet them where they’re at… but you have to know where you stand first. So, these consultations focus on reconciliation across these two intricate positions. Click here to sign-up for an Anchors session!
(P.S. Trainees from our core trainings are given “tokens” that can be used to redeem an Anchors session!)