The Southeast PTTC in collaboration with the National Hispanic & Latino PTTC offers this training for prevention practitioners in HHS Region 4: AL, FL, GA, KY, MI, NC, SC and TN. This training, offered in response to a need identified by Region 4 stakeholders, will focus on the relationship between our personal and professional cultural backgrounds and those of people whose historical roots are embedded in the expansion of Spain, once a powerful global empire. Do people in this diaspora have particular views, beliefs, and biases about substance misuse? Are they different than ours? Dr. Jana Spalding will explore and encourage deeply reflective questions such as--from what cultural framework has the field of prevention developed? What assumptions, unspoken beliefs, and biases exist in the field of prevention? How can we ever know how to work with people whose ways of being in the world are different from ours? How can we ever understand, much less find common ground with, people from another culture in order to prevent substance misuse and promote health?
A native Spanish speaker, Dr. Spalding was born in Panama and completed high school there before immigrating to the US, where she completed her medical degree at Stanford University. She has served for 20+ year in behavioral health, a field she first entered as a peer support specialist. Recovery and peer support training followed, then recovery services administration and university level advanced peer support instruction.
In 2018 Dr. Spalding began building a behavioral health consulting and training practice. During this time the need for services in Spanish to Spanish speakers with behavioral health challenges came into focus in her work. She began translating and interpreting, first as a freelancer and then with a language services company. Dr. Spalding’s passion to advance recovery for Spanish speakers has found an outlet with the National Latino Behavioral Health Association, where, among other collaborations, she has delivered Behavioral Health Interpreter Training face to face and virtually since 2017.