The USC UCEDD Community Advisory Committee provides continuous feedback on various areas of emphasis, including early intervention, health care/mental health, racial, cultural and linguistic disparities, and employment. Our CAC is 75% family members and consumers. Our CA-LEND training program utilizes first-person accounts in every module of our training program. Our CAC Co-chairs are an individual with I/DD and a parent of a child with DD. In addition, one of our consumer advocates also serves a governor-appointed position to the CA State Council on DD, and one of the members from the CAC represents the UCLA Tarjan Center and the UC Davis CEDD. We meet with the CAC three times per fiscal year. The CAC provides input and helps us solve unanticipated problems. As indicated our CAC members are culturally diverse and may be unserved or underserved, and represent the community in Los Angeles. We rotate membership as each CAC member serves for a term including individuals with developmental disabilities, who are culturally diverse, unserved or underserved and representative of the Los Angeles community.
This is a supervision and training component that targets key issues for the effective provision of comprehensive mental health services to clients. The program offers multi-disciplinary trainees bi-weekly meetings conducted mostly in Spanish involving: a) Presentations on bilingual development, language acquisition as well as cultural and linguistic competence; b) Informal discussion regarding relevant topics affecting the Latino/Hispanic population such as: immigration, acculturation, cultural traditions, culturally relevant parenting strategies, and social stigma related to mental health services within the Latino/Hispanic community; and c) Case presentations to assist with learning strategies to best assist families and increase Spanish language skills. CHISTE has been instrumental in providing bilingual/bicultural support to trainees and, as a result, there is now a collaboration with other agencies and children’s hospitals state and nationwide to participate with CHLA’s CHISTE program.
Here are some of our featured community trainings: