Research Paper on Empowering Cultural Competency: How the Boy Scouts of America Succeeds

Introduction

Cultural competency refers to the awareness of the available cultural factors when dealing with clients and colleagues from diverse backgrounds. Boy Scouts of America is a nonprofit scouting organization and ranks among the largest youth groups in America. BSA has about 2.3 million participants, mostly young people and over one million volunteers. BSA owes its success throughout its 109 year lifetime to the different administrators and youth participants who are capable of adopting and working with people from different cultural backgrounds. BSA registers participants from different cultures and countries and cultural competency skills possessed by her service professionals allows their peaceful and prosperous coexistence.

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Cultural Competencies Required of the Human Service Professionals

Service professionals in Boy Scout of America are required to have or grow cultural competence skills and diversity components to enable efficient collaboration with partners and active intervention (Dale and Dulaimi, 2016). Participants in BSA need to be aware and clearly understand one's world view to be able to understand and respect others attitudes and opinions. Also, participants are always supposed to develop positive attitudes towards diverse cultures because no culture is higher than the other; they all deserve respect. Professionals in BSA are required to seek and gain knowledge and understanding of the different cultural practices and different world views that exist in the world. Participants and volunteers who serve in BSA are needed to continuously develop new skills for interaction and communication across the many cultures that are present in the world

Unique Cultural Factors to Clients Benefitting from BSA

The primary beneficiaries of Boy Scout of America are the boy and girl scouts who participate and are part of the organization. These young boys and girls possess unique cultural factors and traits that allow them to benefit from the group significantly. They have positive attitudes towards every individual from every corner of the world. They have a strong commitment to the scouting family and much enjoy the big scouting family where they all belong. They hide all social differences they may have in the past with the standard uniforms and adopt the scouting and equality culture. The American community also benefits through programs undertake by BSA since the American culture is not stable which allows it to take to other ways and acquire new attitudes easily.

Cultural Backgrounds of Stakeholders and Potential Partners

Boy Scouts of America hosts quite an extensive list of individuals or groups who have an interest in their work. The government, for example, expects the organization to provide scout citizens who are law abiding and can make important life decisions on their own. Parents and the participants who are part of the BSA family are mainly from the country, and most of them are from Texas. Being from America, they don't have secure attachments to their cultural backgrounds since America is a country of free will, and everyone can follow to get attached to whatever culture they like. This makes it easy for BSA to instil a scouting culture into them. Potential BSA partners need to be culturally flexible and can efficiently adopt a new way. Charitable organizations who aspire to partner with BSA are supposed to respect all world views like accepting gay people in their groups.

Understanding of the social status of potential partners for BSA helps the organization avoid inevitable cultural clashes and other misunderstandings. This is because they first evaluate their potential partners keenly and understand their policies and cultural diversity components and whether they can merge with theirs without much struggle.

Diversity of Internal and External Stakeholders

When BSA thoroughly scrutinizes the distinct components of their participants and potential partners, they select the ones who are culturally adoptive and who value the culture and beliefs of others. This helps them have strong permanent relationships which are not affected by a change in policies or social standings (Ferris, Hershberg, Su, Wang and Lerner, 2015). The ability to deal with children and adults at the same time strengthens collaborative relationships.

Cultural and Diversity Components to Consider when Solving Organizational Issues

For nonprofit organizations like BSA, issues are easy to manage and solve since the methods used in for-profit and government entities can be equally employed. Public managers or administrators ensure that they consult with all the stakeholders- target community, civic organization and the service providers before addressing an issue (Rice, 2015). For-profit and nonprofit organizations are also supposed to include all stakeholders before and during the process of tackling a problem.

Staff Cultural Backgrounds and Implications

Nonprofit organization workers are culturally flexible since they deal with a more extensive variety of customers from different social and economic classes. Unlike the former, for-profit workers are somehow selective in who to deal with since every for-profit organization operates in a specified business sector just like the government which works in different departments.

Conclusion

Cultural and diversity affect entities in different ways, either favorably or unfavorably. Miscommunication, dysfunctional behaviors and creation of barriers are as a consequence of cultural and diversity. Lasting relationships and strong knowledge bases are built through developed by the effective use of cultural competencies and diversity components.

References

Dale, J. M., & Dulaimi, M. F. (2016). Cultural competence-a success factor in NGO projects? Built Environment Project and Asset Management, 6(2), 232-246. https://doi.org/10.1108/BEPAM-08-2014-0038

Ferris, K. A., Hershberg, R. M., Su, S., Wang, J., & Lerner, R. M. (2015). Character development among the youth of colour from low-SES backgrounds: An examination of Boy Scouts of America's ScoutReach program. Journal of Youth Development, 10(3), 14-30. Retrieved from file:///C:/Users/Admin/Downloads/6-24-2-PB.pdf

Rice, M. F. (2015). Diversity and public administration. ME Sharpe.