Annual Conferences
Living with Disability: Accessing & Improving Culturally & Linguistically Appropriate Services
The 7th Annual Conference of the NJ Statewide Network for Cultural Competence was held on December 4, 2018 at the Professional Center of the Department of Children and Families (DCF) in North Brunswick, N.J.
The conference goals were as follows: 1) Raise awareness about diversity and disparities experienced by diverse populations living with disability throughout the life cycle; 2) Share information resources and assistive technologies to help improve disability literacy and the health and well-being of individuals, families, and communities; and 3) Foster networking and multi-sectoral partnerships among parent/family advocacy groups; disability and human services agencies; libraries; workplaces; and health care, mental health, community, and governmental organizations.
There was a total of 124 attendees, including presenters and exhibitors. The NJ Department of Health provided major grant funding towards the event. Our major sponsors were WellCare Health Plans, Inc., and Horizon NJ Health. There was a total of 10 exhibitors.
A special thank you goes out to our major funders, sponsors, the exhibitors, our expert presenters, the logistics team of the NJSNCC, and all those who made this conference a huge success.
This year’s conference employed a number of innovative presentation methods. The morning session started with Dr. Robert Like’s welcome, conference overview, and presentation of an illustrative multigenerational genogram followed by Dr. Tawara Goode’s keynote presentation entitled “Health Disparities at the Intersection of Race, Ethnicity, and Disability. This was then followed by a highly inter-active panel discussion, with the moderator (Dr. Like) asking each of the 11 panelists targeted questions on various topics relating to the goals of the Conference. The panelists were chosen based on their professional and personal expertise in their field of practice.
A poster session also held a dominant spot in the conference. This is the 3rd year that the highly popular poster session was offered. There was a total of seven (7) posters on exhibit.
The afternoon Roundtable Table Discussions were also something new for this year. The roundtables offered an informal way of meeting and networking among and experts and participants, and enabled the sharing of practical information and resources, helped people gain a deeper insight into the issues, and generated potential solutions relating to the individual’s/agency’s area of concern. Most of the ‘table hosts’ were members from the morning panel, with other experts ‘hosting’ at additional tables. Recommendations from each table were gathered and are presented here.
We not only stepped up our technology this year but also consciously contributed to conserving our environment and resources by ‘going green’. We started using the mobile event app GUIDEBOOK, which allowed us to centralize all our conference content into one space in our mobile devices. Use of the GUIDEBOOK was sent to registered participants prior to the event and sharing of information and comments could be sent live via twitter and Facebook as the conference was going on.
We hope that the learnings gathered and the compendium of resources we provided at the conference will be used by the participants to address and strengthen culturally and linguistically appropriate services in each participant’s field of practice.
Participants were encouraged to complete the conference evaluation on GUIDEBOOK to help the Network plan for future events and explore possible opportunities. We were gratified by the extremely positive evaluations and feedback received. Preliminary results of the over-all evaluation are presented here.
Thank you to all who made this conference a reality and a success!