Self-in-Diverse-Communities Paper .This writing assignment is designed to heighten your self-awareness of your personal biases and values. Critically examining your own membership within diverse communities will help you to develop your understanding of the impact of communities on an individual’s world view. This insight will allow you to eliminate the influence of personal biases and values, and thus enhance your ability to work competently with culturally diverse clients.

1. Choose 3 communities of which you are a member. Consider different definitions of community and community memberships (e.g. geographic, identity-related, and interest-related. Examples include: Gay/Lesbian, military, Texan, African-American, Hispanic, sorority or fraternity, Christian/Muslim/Jewish, recovering addict, person with a history of sexual abuse, person with a significant mental illness, etc.)

2. Describe each community and their components. Explain how each reflects your background, contributes to your identity, and shapes who you are as an individual. Discuss how your membership in each community helped to create and develop your existing personal biases, values and worldview.

3. Describe how the community affects your sense of ethics and morals and how it affects your ability to work with members of that community as well as people not in that community.

4. Explain how your membership in each community affects your awareness of concepts important in the social work profession (i.e. empowerment, systems theory, person in environment, self-determination, etc.), and contributes to your attitudes about working with diverse clients.

Be creative and truly take time on this assignment. Look within yourselves and evaluate who you are, how you became who you are, and how it will affect you as a professional social worker dealing with diverse populations.

3 communities: me African-American, wife is Korean-American, California manly Hispanic

State; California, city; Los Angeles