RECOMMENDATIONS FOR STATE-LEVEL POLICY MAKERS

• Examine legislation, regulations, and practices that affect agencies' ability to provide flexible, family-centered services. Too great an emphasis on accountability and measurable outcomes, for example, may produce agencies that feel they must approach families conservatively and from a stance in which they attempt to exert control over family decisions or patterns.

• Devise ways of ensuring that privacy is protected. For examples, a New Hampshire state family support program requires only very simple paperwork on family visits, even when serious personal issues have been discussed with a worker. After many families testified that too many workers were involved with their families, this state has also worked to reduce the number of workers interacting with a family.

• Identify regulations that pose problems for families and people with disabilities. This many mean asking family members and workers from various cultural and class backgrounds to identify problematic regulations. For example, does a regulation or practice assume that mothers will be available and willing to carry it out? Does a regulation or practice pressure people to conform to white, middle-class values or standards?

• Promote training and experiences that increase sensitivity to the variety of families and individuals agencies meet. Such training could permit participants to explore their own backgrounds and their successes and difficulties in working with people who represent different backgrounds. Training of this nature must be nonjudgmental and must feel safe to participants.

• Develop individualized and flexible programs. Consider cash support as well as vouchers, purchase of goods, or services. In Michigan, for example, direct-cash subsidies, with no strings attached, are very important to families to determine how best to meet their own needs. In several states, flexibility and individualization are enhanced through programs that emphasize family control over what and when services and goods will be purchased or provided and what will be accomplished through informal family and community supports.

• Identify and support the strengths that exist in specific communities. In most states, communities representing diverse cultural or income groups exist. Identify community strengths and work to develop local programs that build on community connections.

• Develop funding and incentives to enhance existing agencies or to start new agencies that meet the needs of diverse groups of families. We do not advocate the development of separate services based on culture or class, but we do believe that states can use funding and other incentives to promote services that are most culturally sensitive.

• Examine the beliefs, values, and assumptions held within the agency about men, women, poor people, and people of races and cultures other than those represented by the majority of agency employees. What is the agency culture, and how well does it accommodate diversity? Solicit input on this question from workers, family members, and people with disabilities, and especially from those who are other than male, white and middle class.

• Ask whether pressure is placed upon family members to conform to what is favored within the agency culture. Are mothers, for examples, listened to and supported in being the kind of people they want to be, or are they expected to conform to a certain image of what a mother should be? Are child-rearing practices that may reflect class or cultural differences understood and respected, or are subtle control mechanisms employed against these practices? Are families wanting services asked to accept beliefs (for example, about managing a child's behavior, purchase of goods, or even about ways of being assertive) that feel wrong or unnatural to them?

• Inform state policy makers of requirements that pose problems due to class, gender, or cultural insensitivity. Advocate for culturally sensitive services and regulations, along with changes in monitoring practices. Propose development of state-level mechanisms to enhance multicultural awareness.

• Establish a climate which promotes respect, listening to and understanding of families. Training and staff meeting experiences can be developed to establish this type of climate, as can an attitude toward workers that respects, understands, and supports them. Exploration of values and attitudes should be encouraged and should feel safe to all involved. At the same time, administrators and co-workers must not tolerate language or behavior that could be harmful or offensive to others. This may mean giving someone more information, intervening when offensive stories or jokes are told, setting up training for workers, or even issuing reprimands. We realize that this is a delicate balance to achieve.

• Examine your personal assumptions, especially in regard to how they affect policy and practice within the state or agency. This should be a continuing process for anyone involved in making policy, whether that relates to regulations, personnel issues, direct contact with families, or other areas. Even basic assumptions having to do with the nature of integration, inclusion, participants, and interdependence may reflect gender, culture, or class stereotypes and biases, and may result in coercion of people with disabilities and their families to conform to something that is uncomfortable for them.

• Establish an advisory group to pull out these issues on a continuing basis. Such an advisory group, including family members, people with disabilities, and staff members, could reflect the cultural, racial and class composition of the state or community and could be asked to identify areas for change.

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