Cultural Expansion Cooperative

What is the Coop?

Our mission is to foster conversations, create resources, and hold space so that a broader base of backgrounds, life experiences, and cultures can be integrated into the fields of speech, occupational, and physical therapy. As historically monolithic groups with deeply ingrained patterns of beliefs, behaviors, and unconscious agreements to keep things the way they always have been, we are missing out on an extraordinary range of humanity. We as clinicians suffer because there is no fertile soil for truly innovative and expansive ideas, which at their core, require the push and pull of different perspectives. Our clients suffer because we collectively do not have the tools, resources, or capacity to truly meet them where they are. Let’s change this.

Safe Space

Every-other-month Zoom calls for learning about and sharing experiences of racial and cultural divides and how this impacts the field of rehabilitation.

Members of the Coop leadership team moderate a safe Zoom space centered around different themes and topics. You can join the call for different reasons that are unique to you, including:

• Just listening in on the conversation in order to learn, connect, and grow.

• Seeking support if you are facing barriers in your career such as racism, discrimination, microaggressions, unconscious biases, and/or dis-empowerment.

• Asking questions you have regarding how to provide clinical care that is appropriate for people of different types of backgrounds and cultures.

  Sample topics:

• Providing culturally competent supervision to graduate students and clinical fellows.
• How to handle meeting or working with a client from a background that you have never worked with or met before in your life.
• Treating when you have an accent (auditory comp, articulation, etc).
• Role of cognition/language disorders in school based discipline.
• How to be respectful of and utilize a client’s culture when they are in their homes for therapy (home therapy, teletherapy).

Podcast

Monthly podcast interviews centering voices of clinicians from all walks of life.

This podcast is for those in allied healthcare who want to expand their clinical practice to be culturally aware, culturally responsive, and culturally competent. The podcast is a dynamic information platform for how speech, occupational, and physical therapy is being practiced across the world and within different cultures and identities.

Christopher Rorke B.Speech-Language Hearing Therapy
Cape Town, South Africa

Outreach

Inspire high school students and early undergrad students to consider a career in SLP, OT, or PT. Challenge what the stereotypical therapist looks like.

Take advantage of our accessible outreach resources, including:

Done for you presentation slide decks you can take to high school and undergraduate classrooms. These slide decks include video messages from under-represented clinicians across SLP, OT, and PT. Giving a presentation can have an extraordinary impact when it comes to increasing awareness of the fields of SLP, OT, and PT to people who otherwise would never have known it was a career option.

Book an outreach presentation for a local high school or undergraduate class presented by one of our outreach specialists via Zoom. You coordinate the date and time, and the coop provides the live presentation.

Coming soon.

Health Literacy

Improve health literacy with non-English patient education handouts released monthly.

Each month, members vote on which patient education handouts we will translate from the Therapy Insights Clinical Resource Library.

Coming soon.