Research indicates the importance of sexual health education as a part of core competency training and ongoing professional capacity building. This includes how service provider values, attitudes and unconscious bias affect service delivery and client care.
Diversity Essentials offers the following workshops tailored to healthcare providers, rehabilitation therapists, and mental health and wellness service providers on sexual literacy and communication skills to quell discomfort and invite meaningful dialogue. Below is a sampling of workshop possibilities. If you have a specific training need, please contact us at info@diversityessentials.com.
1. Inclusive Intakes, Language and Communication
Whether you are in private practice, social services, healthcare or the corporate sector, creating a provider-client bond or maintaining a client-provider relationship requires knowing your client. Assumptions about who your client is, their family or their relationships can impact the quality of service and quality of life. This workshop focuses on the essentials of inclusive communication including practical tools and strategies that help you get to know your client better without the guesswork and upholding dignity.
Session length: Negotiable depending on your needs and participant availability.
2. Human Sexuality and Culture
What exactly is human sexuality? In our a culture of sexual exploitation, the first messages of sexuality and is the avoid and to fear it. However, juxtaposed messages are to embrace sexuality, to be sexually empowered and to foster self-agency in sexual decision making.
This interactive session unpacks and explores how cultural and individual influences affect sexual values formation, and consequently our ability to fully engage in sexual health and wellness decision making. This workshop provides tools to help suspend self-judgement, offers a template to formulate sexual principles, values and ethics, and shares relational communication strategies to elicit clarity and consent. This session can include the following components:
- Explore sexual development throughout the lifespan
- Discussion on sexual influencers and sexual-cultural values and expectations
- Identifying implicit bias in our interpersonal relationships with colleagues and clients
- Tools on how to address any and all sexual health questions with confidence
Session length: Recommended 3 hrs to full day+. Session length is negotiable depending on your needs and participant availability.
3. Sexuality Affirming Service Provider
In our rapidly evolving world, individuals are faced with the task of navigating the cultural mores of sexuality along with their own sexual health and wellness. Research indicates that service providers rarely discuss sex, sexual health, and sexual wellness with their clients. At the same time clients share that those discussions with service providers regarding sex and sexual health are often met with ambivalence, discomfort, or morality-based information.
This full day* workshop invites service providers to explore their attitudes and broaden their awareness and knowledge on the diversity of sexual expressions, sexual diverse relationships, and sexual lifestyles.
This workshop will help participants identify their own unconscious bias, build more comfort and confidence when talking about human sexuality, and to support clients in developing their own sexual health principles that support sexual agency, sexual self-determination and optimal sexual health outcomes.
By the end of the workshop, participants will:
- Gain more comfort and confidence discussing human sexuality
- Explore the history and journey of how colonization impacted our collective views of human sexuality
- Explore how sexuality shapes our attitudes, identities, relationships and cultural lenses
- Examine culturally prescriptive sexual norms on sexual health and wellness
- Identify sexuality-based unconscious bias and microaggressions in the workplace and its impacts on clients
- Better understand the meaning and identify the indicators of sex positivity and being a sex and sexuality affirming service provider
- Acquire the six-fundamentals of sexual health to guide discussions on sexual values and sexual ethics
Delivery style: Facilitation and process oriented, experiential learning oriented, small group and large group activities and discussion, introspective exercises, information delivery, short videos
* Session length: Full day. Session length is negotiable depending on your needs and participant availability.
