Goals of AC-DHS Training and Technical Assistance for its Funded Providers

This training series will empower SUD providers and outreach teams with the communication skills, strategies and tactics to effectively present trauma-informed and culturally-relevant information about options for SUD treatment and recovery. SUD recovery and treatment providers working in the hardest-hit communities will be better equipped to be “message senders,” by understanding oral communication culture and “why & how” to use culturally relevant communication channels to start and support the behavior-change process among low-income BIPOC populations in need of treatment for and recovery from a SUD.

By building the outreach and engagement capacity of Allegheny County’s SUD workforce, frontline staff will be able to better engage and serve low-income marginalized populations. This need is critical, since these same residents have endured many negative experiences in encounters with mainstream institutions (including human-services providers). Therefore, the groundwork to counter and overcome trauma, disparities and lack of trust is essential. The end result of engaging with respect, understanding and empathy will allow the County to begin to reduce health disparities and address systemic inequalities in accessing SUD treatment and recovery services.

Recommended Training Offerings

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Session 1: Digital Community Engagement Toolkit Training

This training provides instruction and support in using the user-friendly “Connect to Protect” Digital Community Engagement Toolkit. The 60-minute, online session prepares grassroots campaign partners to use existing campaign assets to help explain the “what, when, why and how” of free SUD treatment and recovery options in the County, along with much-needed supports for our target audience of families and friends of individuals who are struggling with addiction.

Participants will review the campaign messages and materials and learn how they can use them to execute effective and impactful outreach and engagement. They will also learn how they can customize campaign assets to co-brand their provider organization, and meet the specific needs and interests of their community. They will also be able to increase the visibility of their organization’s efforts and promote their specific services.

As an important added value, each participating organization or agency whose leadership/staff attends this training will be eligible to receive no-cost, post-training TA from MEE. It includes:

  • Ongoing technical assistance for frontline outreach staff (via the TA Request Form in the Toolkit)
  • “Office Hours” by MEE communications and social media experts
  • Support via the TA Request Form and Private Facebook (CPR Community Leaders) page to help providers execute their own outreach, engagement or event ideas

Building Trusting Community Relationships & Real Dialogue

Part 1 – What’s in the Digital Toolkit

  • How to access and use the Toolkit
  • Review of the Toolkit components and campaign communications assets (website, YouTube channel (including family testimonials), ready-to-share social media posts, print and promotional materials to support community outreach and engagement
  • Campaign branding and other graphics
  • Links to MEE’s community-engagement resources

Part 2 – Recruiting Local Families Impacted by SUDs to Your Events

  • How to share toolkit content with your personal and professional networks
  • Sharing campaign social media (in the language and style that reflects your community) to help raise awareness and support your event
  • Customizing content for various platforms (Facebook; Instagram; TikTok; YouTube)

Part 3 – Community Engagement and Events Support

  • Planning, promoting and executing community events (online and in-person logistics)
  • Requesting support for your event (social media cross-promotion, campaign banners/ signage, promotional items for giveaways, stipends for attendance and/or staffing support)
  • Creating safe spaces to discuss difficult or personal topics

Training Details: A new, 60-minute, online Toolkit training session has been added for October 24, 2024 at 1 PM.  Attendance unlocks access to the digital community engagement toolkit, along with ongoing technical assistance from a team of MEE communications and social media professionals.

Session 2: Trauma-Informed Behavior-Change Communications: Tackling Inequities from the Ground Up

Trauma-Informed Behavior Change Communications is designed so participants learn how to develop trauma-informed and culturally-relevant population-health communications that resonates with low-income communities of color and other oral-communication-based populations impacted by SUD disparities and encourages sustainable changes in stigmas, behaviors and lifestyle. It addresses why traditional forms of health communications may not be cost-effective or culturally-sensitive, and also how they may be insulting to low-income audiences and counter-productive to a SUD prevention, intervention, treatment or recovery program’s goals.

This session will enhance participants’ behavioral-health communication skills and their ability to build credibility and trusting relationships with their respective target audiences, increasing both impact and effectiveness. Participants will also learn about the unique social determinants of health (including ongoing exposure to stress and trauma) that low-income, vulnerable and under-resourced residents face—potentially leading them to attempt to cope with drugs or alcohol. Knowing and understanding these determinants will increase empathy and better prepare frontline and outreach staff to build trusting relationships with those who have not previously been well-served by “systems.” The workshop incorporates researchbased and community-tested strategies that can be used immediately, even by agencies and organizations that have been struggling to effectively engage the underserved populations that could most benefit from their SUD programs and services.

Part 1: MEE’s Message-Development Model for Oral-Based Cultures

What is Behavioral Health Communications?

  • The Health Communications Model Overview: Sender | Message | Channel | Receiver
  • MEE’s Approach to Behavioral Health Communications – Flipping the Model (Right to Left)

– Starting with the Receiver and the Worldview of the Receiver
– Understanding the Importance of Oral Communications Culture (OCC) to the Receiver

Part 2 – The Most Culturally-Relevant Messages for the Most Credible and Cost-Effective Delivery Channels for Behavioral Health

Many of the same communication-message misfires around SUD from the early 1990’s are still playing out, just on message-delivery platforms driven by technology and digital media. Both new messaging and new delivery strategies are needed. Now, the latest technology, whether it is a website, mobile app or a social media platform (and digital still must be culturally-relevant), needs to be paired with what MEE calls “human-ology”—interpersonal (virtual or face-to face) interactions with members of a community.

Even though many people now spend hours of each day in front of screens, using their smartphone or online platforms, interpersonal dialogue with peers and others within their social networks is what leads to sustainable behavior-change. These days, SUD treatment and recovery and overdose-prevention providers and behavioral-health agencies will need to use a combination of digital outreach (high-tech) and on-the-ground encounters (high-touch) to interact persuasively with the low-income communities they serve and hope to engage.

  • Online (Technology) vs. Offline (Human-ology) Channels
  • Introduction to “Community as a Channel”
  • SUD-Related Message Development that Engages Communities, including Embedding Effective Counter-Arguments to Barriers, Suspicions and Fears
  • Understanding that due to the serious, life-and-death implications of SUD, the most culturally-relevant and resonant engagement messages are “balanced” – referencing not only to risk factors related to chronic stress & trauma, but also to the strengths (protective) related to resilience, healing and recovery.

As a result of exploring these topics, participants will:

  • Increase their awareness and understanding of the worldview and specific cultural and communication dynamics of low-income communities of color in Allegheny County facing the highest SUD and other health disparities.
  • Identify and classify key differences between oral-based and literate-based cultures.
  • Understand how to apply the important concept of “context” so that it creates/builds trusting relationships with clients who reflect different backgrounds, experiences and worldviews from outreach and other staff at the SUD providers, agencies and programs designed to serve historically mistreated communities.
  • Be able to select the most effective communication and outreach strategies to use with vulnerable populations, including low-income BIPOC and LGBTQ+ individuals of color.
  • Understand the connection between “what to say” and “how to say it.”
  • Defend potential behavioral resistance in role play, active argument/counter-argument exercises with peers, demonstrating efficacy in authentic dialogue with families living in marginalized and vulnerable communities.
  • Execute all of the steps required to develop trauma-informed, culturally relevant messages and materials, including how to develop messages that embed references to stress & trauma, resilience and healing/recovery, so that they resonate with families and community leaders who live in at-risk environments.
  • Implement the presentation of street-credible, authentic and culturally relevant information in such a way that lifestyle changes are sustainable in the context of busy, economically-challenged and stressed-out lives.
  • Learn the protective factors that facilitate thriving coping behaviors and “upstream” primary prevention.
  • List the risk factors (including ongoing stress) and daunting social determinants of health (SDOH) that continue to keep low-income, Black and Brown families at a disproportionate disadvantage for survival, along with the protective factors that can inoculate them against the stressors and facilitate thriving coping behaviors, SUD recovery and even “upstream” primary SUD prevention.

Workshop Details: This in-person, 2.5-hour, interactive, in-person overview will be held on Wednesday, September 11, from 9:30 AM (sign–in) to 12:30 PM. Attendance grants access to MEE’s Community Engagement Resource Portal.

Session 3: Community-Engagement Concepts for Countering Trauma, Disparities and Lack of Trust

Authentic, on-the-ground community engagement needs to be part of any SUD provider’s/ professional’s Toolbox, even though this approach is often ignored because it is perceived as “too hard” to pull off. MEE will provide an understanding of the importance of community mobilization as a communications channel. The training will address why community engagement is an essential, cost-efficient and more effective approach to engaging and building ongoing relationships with hard-to-reach populations, including those who have been historically mistreated or underserved by government agencies … leading to mistrust, resentment and resistance. Knowing how to do the roll-up-your-sleeves, boots-on-the-ground, face-to-face dialogue with oral-based cultures will help build trust and enhance the key community relationships that will sustain the County’s SUD work needed to face health disparities head-on and begin to reduce inequities.

  • Overview of MEE’s culturally-relevant community outreach and mobilization strategies.
    • Learn why and how to effectively engage community leaders in order to mobilize residents for community-wide dialogue by involving and leveraging numerous access touchpoints.
  • Discuss the negative experiences vulnerable populations have encountered with mainstream institutions (including human-services providers) and how community engagement can work to counter trauma, disparities and lack of trust.
  • A demonstration of how community-engagement models are not just inclusive, but also support long-term sustainability, by creating trusted relationships with community members, but also increasing their own skills/capacity to improve outcomes into the future.

Every successful MEE campaign has a community-engagement component central to it— we value and prioritize it. MEE’s community-engagement approach and models have been tested and proven over more than three decades of experience in urban and underserved communities. MEE’s three (3) evidence-based models take a “bottom up” rather than “top down” approach to engaging communities. They are also trauma-informed, reflecting the often harsh economic and social realities of underserved populations. Finally, the models are community-developed, not adopted from mainstream interventions; they extensively involve the target audience in their development and implementation..

As a result of exploring these topics, participants will:

  • Increase their awareness and understanding of authentic, on-the-ground community engagement as part of a public- or behavioral-health professional’s “toolbox” and be able to apply it to counter a lack of trust in mainstream institutions, even though this approach is often ignored because it is perceived as “too hard” to pull off.
  • Create and leverage a network of community partners as a message delivery channel that can be both more culturally-relevant and cost-effective than mainstream, traditional media.
  • Understand why the best use for even the latest digital technology (high-tech) is as a
    mechanism to drive as many members of hard-to-reach audiences as possible to on-theground, community-based encounters (high-touch) where authentic dialogue can take place.
    A circular framework then allows these audiences to use digital solutions like social media
    platforms to maintain the established relationship and/or to seek more detailed information
    as needed.

AC-DHS-funded drug and alcohol services providers who gain skills in effective, community engagement will have a blueprint for developing lasting connections that restore and build trust with skeptical residents and address a range of health disparities and inequities (i.e., SUDs) in low-income communities of color. Building this type of credibility increases both impact and effectiveness.

Workshop Details: This 3-hour, in-person, skills-building workshop will be offered in Fall/Winter 2024. Attendance grants access to MEE’s Community Engagement Resource Portal.

In Planning: Creating Safe Spaces for Communities of Color

Co-facilitated by MEE partner, Sulaiman Nuriddin M. Ed. and a local, community-embedded therapist of color within Allegheny County, this interactive workshop is a professional development opportunity for any providers or clinical staff (including frontline, outreach, home visitors, and therapists) who work directly with families and individuals impacted by substance-use disorders and other health disparities. The workshop is designed to improve participants’ cultural competency and ability to effectively communicate about the range of prevention, intervention, recovery and treatment options with communities of color.

 

This workshop will enhance participants’ ability to create more welcoming environments and positive interactions with both families of color, in order to foster and support healthy interpersonal relationships within them (including reconciliation and reunification), promote open communication about SUD and reduce the potential for domestic abuse or partner violence.

As a result of exploring these topics, participants will:

  • Gain information and context that enhances empathy for clients who reflect different backgrounds, experiences and worldviews from outreach and other staff at the agencies and programs designed to serve them.
  • Engage in discussions and activities to contextualize the experiences and worldviews of people of color and how they are negatively impacted by stereotypes and misperceptions.
  • Increase their awareness and understanding of the worldview and specific cultural and interpersonal communication dynamics of people of color.
  • Gain tips on how to support people of color in being present in their intimate and family relationships, address struggles related to power and control issues, and navigate one’s behavioral health and SUD in the family.
  • Participate in hands-on, interactive role exercises to prepare them for an authentic, and ultimately, effective dialogue with communities of color, including African-American men and fathers.
  • Learn how to foster safe spaces where men of color can discuss learned masculinity, make sense of their own feelings and support the feelings of others, so that they can actively participate in or support SUD recovery and treatment efforts.

Workshop Details: This 2.5-hour interactive workshop can be delivered online or in-person. Attendance includes access to MEE’s Community Engagement Resource Portal.