This project will continue until the end of the course, where the cumulative project is submitted in Module 5.

Develop a Community Agency Observation project that would be of approximately ten hours duration in total at a community organization in your town or city. The community agency observation projects can be individualized and must be approved by the instructor. For example, you could observe international agencies or churches in your community that have English as a Second Language (ESL) programs.

Make sure that you choose an organization where you will be able to:

• Assess the multicultural organizational development of the institution.
• Summarize a few critical incidents during which multicultural aspects were addressed (directly and indirectly).
• Examine the influence of diversity on human services delivery issues, such as problem identification, symptom expression, and help-seeking behavior.
• Analyze how those critical incidents affected your cultural self-awareness and professional relationship, specific to the provision of culturally competent services.
• Apply a multicultural and interdisciplinary approach to generate a proposal on what the organization can do to improve its service delivery in a population from diverse cultural or ethnic backgrounds.

Tasks:

Develop a 3- to 4-page Community Agency Observation proposal that includes the following:

• The type of agency you would be observing.
• The reason this type of agency is important to your field.
• An explanation of 2–3 professional goals that you hope to reach through this observation. Make sure that your goals are SMART—specific, measurable, attainable, realistic, and timely.