NEW! How to Give a One-Day Training in Cultural Competence That's Fun, Simple and Effective

For the third time since 2010, our Book of the Week section features one of our own books: we hope you'll forgive us!

PUBLISHED THIS WEEK! This trainer's guide offers a road map on how to deliver a one-day workshop on cultural competence. The curriculum targets service providers, frontline staff and interpreters. It covers three areas: healthcare, education and human services.

Purchase this guide to help your organization promote equal access to public and community services and reduce health disparities. The curriculum is based on national standards for cultural and linguistic competence from the U.S. Office of Minority Health, and federal laws, national best practices and cultural competence training standards. The one-day program is easy to adapt to your target audience.

Now the troupe for 25 years has been pioneering a new profession: sign language entertainment. The Shuwa (sign language) Performance Kilrogumi troupe feel "strongly about using sign language not just as something related to social welfare, but also as entertainment."

So says Ruruka Minami, the subject of a charming interview in a Japanese publication. Minami came to love the Deaf community in Japan in great part for cultural reasons: she says she feels ill at ease with the common Japanese habit of under-expressing personal ideas and opinions. She finds Deaf people different and more direct: more willing to say what they feel. She considers them a gift.

The Voice of Love and Healing Voices

Remember the nonprofit that we support: The Voice of Love. As many of you know this is my pro bono work, and it is a work of love.

But perhaps you don't know how many other volunteers have worked to make this possible. Healing Voices: Interpreting for Survivors of Torture, War Trauma and Sexual Violence is the only week-long training in the world about interpreting for survivors of torture, war trauma and sexual violence--entirely created by volunteers.

Healing Voices is coming back to Columbia, Maryland. (Nearest airport: Baltimore-Washington.)The premier program in the world for trauma-informed interpreting, it runs May 4-8, 2015 in Columbia, MD, 8:30 a.m. to 5:00 p.m. (except Friday, May 8, when it runs 8:30 a.m. to 12:30 p.m.).

The program has 14 volunteer authors and two contributing authors who include a psychiatrist and professor of medicine, a PhD psychologist and a PhD/professor of social work LCSW-C, all focused on torture treatment; two attorneys; a therapist interpreter trainer; and leading curriculum developers and trainers including "household names" in our field like Cindy Roat, Nataly Kelly, Carola Green and Nora Goodfriend-Koven.

The Voice of Love the only nonprofit organization in the world devoted to developing and delivering training on this topic.