What is Cultural Humility?

Cultural Humility Task Force Home What is Cultural Humility? Cultural Humility Conference Cultural Humility Ambassador Program

 

The concept of cultural humility was developed by Melanie Tervalon and Jann Murray-Garcia in 1998 to address inequities in the healthcare field. It is now used in many fields, including education, public health, social work, and library science, to increase the quality of interactions between workers (i.e. library staff and educators) and their diverse community members.  Cultural humility goes beyond the concept of cultural competence to include:

  1. A personal lifelong commitment to self-evaluation and self-critique

  2. Recognition of power dynamics and imbalances, a desire to fix those power imbalances and to develop partnerships with people and groups who advocate for others

  3. Institutional accountability (Tervalon & Murray-Garcia, 1998) 

To learn more, visit Project READY.