CLASSIFYING THE "AVERAGE" AMERICAN

As the multicultural population in North America explodes, so does the market potential and workforce become based on this multicultural dynamic. Companies and entrepreneurs often miss market penetration because they fail to understand specific target groups' cultural values and customs. Cultural and ethnic diversity is challenging the way we do business with multicultural communities. To penetrate the diverse multicultural population, we might first think we need to define a typical customer profile.

Despite conventional thinking, the idea of the "typical" American customer is a fiction. Rather, from the "tossed salad" that is the American population, several dominant populations comprise the American market base. Based on racial origins, Americans fall into one or more groups: Hispanic, Afro-American, Asian or Caucasian.

Hispanic

Hispanics are the largest minority group in the United States, accounting for 13% of the population, according to the 2000 census. The Hispanic race refers to people of Latino origin, recalling their ancestry to Spain, Latin America and even a few Mediterranean countries. However, with generations of intermarriages between Whites and Hispanics in the United States, the distinction between the two races is diminishing. Nonetheless, Hispanics are known for their strong family ties and close family upbringing involving continuous interactions with extended family. They take their individual honour and respect, and that of their family, very seriously.

With improving education, jobs and improving lifestyles, the spending power of Hispanics has increased considerably. They controlled $686 billion in spending in 2004; therefore, marketing to the Hispanic market bears tremendous potential. The Hispanic consumer is be passionate about the things he or she loves, and your approach to this population must include a deep understanding of its strong cultures values. Because Hispanics are generally high-spirited, family-oriented people, marketing approaches that use family themes have a very strong appeal. A good sense of humor and wit are also generally appreciated. Companies reaching out to this population should use Spanish to market products, as Hispanics have a pronounced native language preference. Advertising through ethnic media also has become a very effective way to reach out to this population.

Afro-Americans

The Afro-American or Black American demographic segment owes its origin to Africa. Although a large number of Africans were brought into the United States as slaves during colonial times, voluntary immigrants from Caribbean, African, and South American countries who are seeking better lifestyles also constitute this population. Interestingly, surveys indicate that most Afro-Americans consider themselves a homogenous race, irrespective of their particular ancestries.

The average Afro-American's spending power has increased significantly, and middle-class families today spend considerably on individual gratification. A majority of this population's income goes to housing and related costs. However, as their income has increased, Afro-Americans have tended to spend more on personal goods than household ones. In addition, even though this section of the population is more price conscious, it is highly motivated by quality. Afro-Americans are influenced heavily by the media, especially by television and magazines; they are reported to recall what they read more than other all other groups of readers. The witnessed increase in spending power is largely due to better job opportunities for women, and these increases are reflected in this population's increased spending on cosmetics, hair care, manicures and massages. A significant part of this demographic's purchasing power, therefore, is now concentrated in the hands of Afro-American women-a market that most enterprises fail to identify and exploit.

Asians

Asian-Americans are the fastest growing demographic segment in the United States. Today, they are also the most diverse ethnic group in the United States with influences from more than fifteen different cultures, including Bangladeshi, Cambodian, Chinese, Filipino, Indian, Indonesian, Japanese, Korean, Laotian, Malaysian, Pakistani, Sri Lankan, Taiwanese, Thai and Vietnamese.

Asians and Latinos share their culture-bound strong bonds to their families and seemingly traditional worldviews. Asians have strong desires and motivation to achieve middle-class or professional-class status. The average Asian-American is better educated, better paid, and younger, making them an affluent and educated section of the population. Asians are known to be brand-conscious, with a preference for highly advertised brands. If your business is eyeing the Asian market, advertising through Asian media is likely to help you break into the Asian markets. Word of mouth is very effective with this population as well.

Caucasians

Although the word Caucasian (or Whites as they are more commonly known) has complex and debatable anthropological connotations, the distinguishing factor between Caucasians and others in the United States is skin colour. These people are believed to have originally been inhabitants of the mountainous Caucasus area, which today comprise of parts of Europe, Russia, Central Asia and South Asia.

Caucasians make most purchases on credit. They are far less clannish compared to other populations; decision making is an individual affair and seldom involves consultation with parents or extended family. When you sell to Caucasian consumers, remember that they look for the best you can offer; the rhetorical question they often ask is what theycan gain from transacting with your business. They lean toward higher standards of living, convenience and luxury-the reason that many advertisers market products by packaging them into a dream to which these customers aspire. Many Caucasians value good customer service and are willing to pay extra to be assured that they are in good hands.

The Future of Marketing to a Diverse Population Businesses today no longer cater to a faceless population. The boons of customizing products and services to suit specific customer needs are simply too profitable. Understanding your customers well is the first step to greater customer satisfaction, retention and expansion.

Until recently, advertising and marketing floodlights have been directed at White America. Now, with the growing knowledge of North America's changing demographics, more and more corporations have begun to realize the benefits of targeting ethnic groups separately. There is a goldmine out there waiting to be tapped. It's time we realized it and began marketing better.

About David McLauren, Ph.D.

David is a diversity specialist who speaks five languages. He brings a wealth of education and expertise to businesses and brilliantly helps companies increase their profits and productivity through diversity. 

A highly sought-after keynote speaker, facilitator, and expert on diversity, inclusion, and multi-cultural issues, David consistently energizes, educates, and empowers his audiences.

Please contact Gateways for more information about David or how to hire him as a speaker.

Diversity training molds culturally competent nurses

Christa Sgobba

A top Federal Communications Commission official believes that “progressives” should challenge conservative media moguls like Rush Limbaugh and Rupert Murdoch.

FCC Chief Diversity Officer Mark Lloyd made that argument in a 2007 report he penned for the liberal Center for American Progress, CNS News reports.

The article was titled “Media Maneuvers: Why the Rush to Waive Cross-Ownership Bans?” It discusses the FCC’s decision to allow Chicago real estate kingpin Sam Zell to buy the Chicago Tribune.

Lloyd argues that liberals should follow the tactics that President Franklin Roosevelt used to fight concentration of the media in conservative hands, such as then Tribune publisher Col. Robert McCormick.

Lloyd maintains that Zell could mirror McCormick, by joining other conservative media heavies, including Limbaugh and Murdoch, to work against liberals.

“The vast majority of Zell’s political contributions go to support conservative candidates and causes,” Lloyd wrote, as cited by CNS. “Is Zell a modern Col. McCormick waiting in the wings to join forces with Rupert Murdoch and Rush Limbaugh?”

Lloyd claimed that the conservative media moguls were in league with the Supreme Court to battle liberals in the government.

“A pro-big business Supreme Court aligned with Murdoch, Limbaugh, and Zell and ready to battle a progressive in the White House begins to sound a lot like the early years of the FDR administration,” Lloyd wrote.

“Will progressives sound like FDR and commit to creating a media policy that actually serves democracy and promotes diverse and antagonistic sources of news?”

Of course it’s difficult to argue that the media is under threat from conservatives when so many newspapers support Democrats on their editorial pages.

And it’s hardly accurate to call Murdoch a doctrinaire conservative. He is famous for allying himself with politicians of all stripes, including Hillary Clinton, to further his business interests.

The policy of the United States Federal Communications Commission that became known as the "Fairness Doctrine" is an attempt to ensure that all coverage of controversial issues by a broadcast station be balanced and fair. The FCC took the view, in 1949, that station licensees were "public trustees," and as such had an obligation to afford reasonable opportunity for discussion of contrasting points of view on controversial issues of public importance. The Commission later held that stations were also obligated to actively seek out issues of importance to their community and air programming that addressed those issues. With the deregulation sweep of the Reagan Administration during the 1980s, the Commission dissolved the fairness doctrine.

This doctrine grew out of concern that because of the large number of applications for radio station being submitted and the limited number of frequencies available, broadcasters should make sure they did not use their stations simply as advocates with a singular perspective. Rather, they must allow all points of view. That requirement was to be enforced by FCC mandate.

From the early 1940s, the FCC had established the "Mayflower Doctrine," which prohibited editorializing by stations. But that absolute ban softened somewhat by the end of the decade, allowing editorializing only if other points of view were aired, balancing that of the station's. During these years, the FCC had established dicta and case law guiding the operation of the doctrine.

In ensuing years the FCC ensured that the doctrine was operational by laying out rules defining such matters as personal attack and political editorializing (1967). In 1971 the Commission set requirements for the stations to report, with their license renewal, efforts to seek out and address issues of concern to the community. This process became known as "Ascertainment of Community Needs," and was to be done systematically and by the station management.

The fairness doctrine ran parallel to Section 315 of the Communications Act of 1937 which required stations to offer "equal opportunity" to all legally qualified political candidates for any office if they had allowed any person running in that office to use the station. The attempt was to balance--to force an even handedness. Section 315 exempted news programs, interviews and documentaries. But the doctrine would include such efforts. Another major difference should be noted here: Section 315 was federal law, passed by Congress. The fairness doctrine was simply FCC policy.

The FCC fairness policy was given great credence by the 1969 U.S. Supreme Court case of Red Lion Broadcasting Co., Inc. v. FCC. In that case, a station in Pennsylvania, licensed by Red Lion Co., had aired a "Christian Crusade" program wherein an author, Fred J. Cook, was attacked. When Cook requested time to reply in keeping with the fairness doctrine, the station refused. Upon appeal to the FCC, the Commission declared that there was personal attack and the station had failed to meet its obligation. The station appealed and the case wended its way through the courts and eventually to the Supreme Court. The court ruled for the FCC, giving sanction to the fairness doctrine.

The doctrine, nevertheless, disturbed many journalists, who considered it a violation of First Amendment rights of free speech/free press which should allow reporters to make their own decisions about balancing stories. Fairness, in this view, should not be forced by the FCC. In order to avoid the requirement to go out and find contrasting viewpoints on every issue raised in a story, some journalists simply avoided any coverage of some controversial issues. This "chilling effect" was just the opposite of what the FCC intended.

By the 1980s, many things had changed. The "scarcity" argument which dictated the "public trustee" philosophy of the Commission, was disappearing with the abundant number of channels available on cable TV. Without scarcity, or with many other voices in the marketplace of ideas, there were perhaps fewer compelling reasons to keep the fairness doctrine. This was also the era of deregulation when the FCC took on a different attitude about its many rules, seen as an unnecessary burden by most stations. The new Chairman of the FCC, Mark Fowler, appointed by President Reagan, publicly avowed to kill to fairness doctrine.

By 1985, the FCC issued its Fairness Report, asserting that the doctrine was no longer having its intended effect, might actually have a "chilling effect" and might be in violation of the First Amendment. In a 1987 case, Meredith Corp. v. FCC, the courts declared that the doctrine was not mandated by Congress and the FCC did not have to continue to enforce it. The FCC dissolved the doctrine in August of that year.

However, before the Commission's action, in the spring of 1987, both houses of Congress voted to put the fairness doctrine into law--a statutory fairness doctrine which the FCC would have to enforce, like it or not. But President Reagan, in keeping with his deregulatory efforts and his long-standing favor of keeping government out of the affairs of business, vetoed the legislation. There were insufficient votes to override the veto. Congressional efforts to make the doctrine into law surfaced again during the Bush administration. As before, the legislation was vetoed, this time by Bush.

The fairness doctrine remains just beneath the surface of concerns over broadcasting and cablecasting, and some members of congress continue to threaten to pass it into legislation. Currently, however, there is no required balance of controversial issues as mandated by the fairness doctrine. The public relies instead on the judgment of broadcast journalists and its own reasoning ability to sort out one-sided or distorted coverage of an issue. Indeed, experience over the past several years since the demise of the doctrine shows that broadcasters can and do provide substantial coverage of controversial issues of public importance in their communities, including contrasting viewpoints, through news, public affairs, public service, interactive and special programming.

-Val E. Limburg

Can the U.S. government take a woman's baby from her because she doesn't speak English? That's the latest question to arise in the hothouse debate over illegal immigration, as an undocumented woman from impoverished rural Mexico — who speaks only an obscure indigenous language — fights in a Mississippi court to regain custody of her infant daughter.

Cirila Baltazar Cruz comes from the mountainous southern state of Oaxaca, a region of Mexico that makes Appalachia look affluent. To escape the destitution in her village of 1,500 mostly Chatino Indians, Baltazar Cruz, 34, migrated earlier this decade to the U.S., hoping to send money back to two children she'd left in her mother's care. She found work at a Chinese restaurant on Mississippi's Gulf Coast.

But Baltazar Cruz speaks only Chatino, barely any Spanish and no English. Last November, she went to Singing River Hospital in Pascagoula, Miss., where she lives, to give birth to a baby girl, Rubí. According to documents obtained by the Mississippi Clarion-Ledger, the hospital called the state Department of Human Services (DHS), which ruled that Baltazar Cruz was an unfit mother in part because her lack of English "placed her unborn child in danger and will place the baby in danger in the future." 

Rubí was taken from Baltazar Cruz, who now faces deportation. In May, a Jackson County judge gave the infant to a couple (it is unclear if for foster care or adoptive purposes) who reportedly live in Ocean Springs. Baltazar Cruz is challenging the ruling in Jackson County Youth Court and hopes that if she is deported she can at least take Rubí back to Mexico with her. (She has not disclosed the father's identity.) 

Baltazar Cruz's case has been taken up by the Mississippi Immigrants' Rights Alliance (MIRA) and the Alabama-based Southern Poverty Law Center (SPLC), whose lawyers say they can't comment on its specifics because of a judge's gag order. But Mary Bauer, the SPLC's legal director, says that on a general level, any notion that a mother can lose custody of a child because she doesn't speak a particular language "is a fundamentally outrageous violation of human rights." (Read "When Motherhood Gets You Jail Time.")

Before the gag order, advocates for Baltazar Cruz had charged that the problems sprang from faulty translation at Singing River. Baltazar Cruz arrived at the hospital after she flagged down a Pascagoula police officer on a city street. She was later joined there by a Chatino-speaking relative, according to MIRA, but the hospital declined his services and instead used a translator from state social services, an American of Puerto Rican descent who spoke no Chatino and whose Spanish was significantly different from that spoken in Mexico.

According to the Clarion-Ledger, the state report portrayed Baltazar Cruz as virtually a prostitute, claiming she was "exchanging living arrangements for sex" in Pascagoula and planned to put the child up for adoption. Through her advocates (before the gag order), Baltazar Cruz adamantly denied those claims. Since "she has failed to learn the English language," the newspaper quotes the documents as saying, she was "unable to call for assistance for transportation to the hospital" to give birth. The social-services translator also reported that Baltazar Cruz had put Rubí in danger because she "had not brought a cradle, clothes or baby formula." But indigenous Oaxacan mothers traditionally breast feed their babies for a year and rarely use bassinets, carrying their infants instead in a rebozo, a type of sling.

MIRA has accused Singing River and Mississippi DHS of essentially "stealing" Rubí. Citing the gag order, DHS will not comment on Baltazar Cruz's case, but before the order, an official insisted to the Clarion-Ledger that "the language a person speaks has nothing to do with the outcome of the investigation." Singing River spokesman Richard Lucas calls the MIRA charge "preposterous" and, while noting that the nonprofit hospital delivered Baltazar Cruz's baby free of charge, insists it "did what any good hospital would have done given her unusual circumstances" by alerting DHS.

Still, despite DHS statements to the contrary, language seems a central issue in the state's case against Baltazar Cruz. It wouldn't be the first time this has happened in the U.S. In 2004 a Tennessee judge ordered into foster care the child of a Mexican migrant mother who spoke only an indigenous tongue. (Another judge later returned the child to her family.) Last year, a California court took custody of the U.S.-born twin babies of another indigenous, undocumented migrant from Oaxaca. After she was deported, the Oaxaca state government's Institute for Attention to Migrants fought successfully to have the twins repatriated to her in Mexico this summer. In such cases, says the SPLC's Bauer, a lack of interpreters is a key factor. When a mother can't follow the proceedings, "she looks unresponsive, and that conveys to a judge a lack of interest in the child, which is clearly not the case," she says. She also argues it's hard enough for any adult to learn a new language, "let alone when you're a migrant working long hours for low pay."

One of DHS's apparent fears is that an infant isn't safe in a home where the mother can articulate a 911 call solely in a language spoken only by some 50,000 Oaxacan Indians. Bauer points out that children have been raised safely in the U.S. by non-English-speaking parents for well over a century. Had they not, thousands of Italians and Russians would have had to leave their kids with foster care on Ellis Island. "Raising your child is one of the most fundamental liberties, and it can only be taken from you for the most serious concerns of endangerment," says Bauer. "Not speaking English hardly meets that standard."

Rosalba Piña, a Chicago attorney who co-hosts a local radio program on immigration law, agrees. She likens Mississippi officials to those who fought to keep 6-year-old Elián Gonzalez in the U.S. nine years ago because they argued his life would be better here than in impoverished Cuba with his father. "They're ignoring basic U.S. and international law," says Piña. "Unless there's some real threat to the child's life back in the home country, most judges know it's in the child's best interest to be with his parents." In the end, she notes, Rubí is a U.S. citizen who could return to this country at any time as an adult.

The next court hearing in Baltazar Cruz's case is slated for November. In the meantime, Mexican consular officials in the U.S. struck an agreement with Mississippi authorities this month to ensure that Mexico will be informed when nationals like Baltazar Cruz become embroiled in cases like this. Says Daniel Hernandez Joseph, director of Mexico's program for protection of citizens abroad: "The main concern of the Mexican government is not to separate immigrant families." Baltazar Cruz now has to persuade Mississippi judges that it should be their concern too.

• Business and Trade Internships
• Medical Internships and Volunteer Work
• Technology Internships
• Canadian Government Internships
• Child Related Internships that includes teaching internships
• U.N. Internships
• Humanitarian & Developmental Volunteer work
• Environmental Internships and Volunteer work

Are You an Internationally Educated Registered Nurse?

When you apply to the provincial regulatory nursing authority you will be required to submit your transcripts from the school you graduated from. The nursing courses will be scrutinized for content and hours.

Content

Your basic nursing education must include a sufficient number of hours of nursing theory and practice. This includes:

• biological sciences
• social sciences
• physical assessment
• health assessment
• problem solving
• research
• legal and ethical issues in nursing
• social and political trends affecting health care
• health promotion and illness prevention
• leadership theory
• nursing across the lifespan
• communication, specifically therapeutic communication within the professional helping relationship

Hours

Your transcript must show sufficient hours in both nursing theory and clinical courses with clients across the lifespan and include maternal/child, pediatrics, and mental health nursing.

Substantially Equivalent Competency Assessment (SEC)

If your paper documentation is not sufficient evidence to show equivalency to that expected in Canada you may be required to take a substantially equivalent competency assessment (SEC). The recommendation for an SEC is made by the provincial regulatory body.

Re-entry nurse education programs

All nurses in Canada must maintain their competency to practice. The best way to maintain your competency is to practice nursing. There are, of course, a variety of reasons why your nursing practice may be interrupted.

If you have not practiced a minimum number of hours (usually between 1100 and 1700) in the last five years you will not be allowed to practice until you have completed a re-entry or "refresher course" to update knowledge and skills for contemporary nursing practice.

Re-entry nurse education programs must also be approved by the nursing regulatory body.

http://www.registered-nurse-canada.com/nurse_education.html#recognized