Recruitment and Retention Strategies for Culturally Specific Behavioral Health Staff (Innovative and Successful Approaches to Staff Recruitment and Retention Webinar Series Part 2)

Innovative and Successful Approaches to Staff Recruitment and Retention, July - September 2022, Northwest ATTC

This is part 2 of the Northwest ATTC's 3-part summer webinar series: Innovative and Successful Approaches to Staff Recruitment and Retention. Find information on all 3 parts here.

Fernando Pena The current behavioral health workforce emergency is nothing new in the culturally and linguistically specific communities in Oregon and the Pacific Northwest. Traditional recruitment strategies by dominant culture organizations often fail due to a variety of systemic and cultural barriers that are largely invisible to the established behavioral health systems. Executive Director Fernando Peña with NW Instituto Latino operates a culturally specific SUD Recovery Community Organization that despite the ongoing behavioral health workforce emergency is fully staffed with culturally and linguistically specific staff and routinely has multiple applicants for each open position as one becomes available. In this session, Fernando shared his understanding of the systemic barriers that impact Latinx communities when it comes to the behavioral health workforce as well as some strategies he has used to recruit, retain and support their respective teams.