HEALER© Training: Expanding Cultural Humility in Community Clinics

Academic Mentor | Dr. Margarita Teran-Garcia
Community Partner | Avicenna Community Health Center

Project Description
Cultural humility is a lifelong learning process that goes beyond traditional cultural competence training, aiming to foster self-awareness, empathy, and the ability to effectively engage with diverse communities. The HEALER© training program (Humility, Empathy, Awareness, Leverage, Empower, Reflect) was developed to address this need and has been implemented within the Integrated Health Disparities Program (IHD) at Illinois Extension.

This project will expand on the HEALER© program by evaluating its existing modules and developing new training materials tailored to volunteer clinics and other health-promotion settings. Using data from previous workshops, the project will assess the program’s impact on participants’ cultural humility and explore opportunities to adapt it to different community needs. Workshops will include training with case vignettes to simulate real-world scenarios, focus groups to gather feedback, and pre- and post-evaluations to measure effectiveness. The goal of this project is to refine and implement the program in diverse settings, improving the cultural humility of healthcare providers and volunteers.

Role of the Community-Academic Scholar
The scholar will:

• Contribute to evaluating the existing HEALER© training modules and developing new materials, including culturally relevant case vignettes
• Summarize data from previous workshops and focus groups, to inform the program’s evaluation and refinement
• Facilitate training workshops, gathering feedback from participants, and analyzing data from pre- and post-evaluations
• Work closely with the academic mentor, community partners, and clinic staff, ensuring that the training modules are tailored to the needs of the communities they serve

By contributing to the HEALER© program’s development and expansion, the scholar will help enhance its impact on cultural humility training in healthcare.