Culture Counts: About this guide

Culture Counts: A Guide to Best Practices for Developing Health Promotion Initiatives in Mental Health and Substance Use with Ethnocultural Communities

On this page:

How this guide was developed
Who this guide is for
How to use this guide

How this guide was developed

This guide is the outcome of the Best Practices in Community Education in Mental Health and Addiction with Ethnoracial/Ethnocultural Communities Project, a partnership among eight organizations:

The Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, Toronto, Ontario
The Multicultural Council of Windsor-Essex County, Ontario
Polycultural Immigrant and Community Services, Toronto, Ontario
Portuguese Mental Health and Addiction Services, Toronto Western Hospital, Ontario
Punjabi Community Health Centre, Mississauga, Ontario
Society for the Aid of Ceylon (Sri Lanka) Minorities (SACEM), Scarborough, Ontario
The Somali Centre for Family Services, Ottawa, Ontario
Vasantham – A Tamil Seniors Wellness Centre, (PDF) Toronto, Ontario.

The first phase of the project focused on low-risk alcohol use, and used the Low-Risk Drinking Guidelines (LRDG) to test a best practices approach. Seven ethnocultural communities (Portuguese, Tamil, Somali, Russian, Polish, Serbian and Punjabi) were consulted to determine whether the LRDG could be adapted to their needs.

The second phase of the project involved either adapting and translating the LRDG or developing a new product for each community.

A literature review and the Culture Counts project led to the general conclusion that health promotion initiatives designed for the mainstream population are not generally effective for ethnocultural communities.

The literature review also showed a lack of information about developing health promotion initiatives with ethnocultural communities. This guide represents the third phase of the project, which is intended as a step in filling that gap by providing comprehensive, effective and culturally appropriate approaches to meet the health promotion needs of ethnocultural communities.

What is “health promotion”?

The World Health Organization defines health promotion as “the process of enabling people to increase control over, and to improve, their health. To reach a state of complete physical, mental and social well-being, an individual or group must be able to identify and to realize aspirations, to satisfy needs, and to change or cope with the environment.

“Health is, therefore, seen as a resource for everyday life, not the objective of living. Health is a positive concept emphasizing social and personal resources, as well as physical capacities. Therefore, health promotion goes beyond healthy life-styles to well-being.” (WHO, 1986)

To learn more about health promotion:

Centre for Addiction and Mental Health (CAMH) “Health Promotion Resources”

What are “ethnocultural” communities?

For the purposes of this guide, “ethnocultural” communities are defined as those communities whose members have ethnic origins that are not French, British or Aboriginal.

While ethnocultural communities often include newcomers, it is important to remember they also include people whose roots in Canada go back more than one generation.

To learn more about defining ethnocultural communities:

Statistics Canada: “Ethnicity: Concept”

What are “best practices”?

In the Interactive Domain Model (IDM) of health promotion, best practices in health promotion are defined as “those sets of processes and activities that are consistent with health promotion values/goals/ethics, theories/beliefs, evidence, and understanding of the environment, and that are most likely to achieve health promotion goals in a given situation.”*

The practices described in this guide are those that were found to work effectively in the Culture Counts project. The key, however, is to find what is “most likely to achieve health promotion goals in a given situation”; use these practices as a guide but listen to your intended audience and be ready to adapt to their needs.

* Source: Michael Goodstadt and Barbara Kahan, “Best Practices in Health Promotion: The Interactive Domain Model,”

Who this guide is for

This guide is intended for anyone working for a mainstream agency or organization who is considering undertaking a health promotion initiative with ethnocultural communities, or who has attempted to do so in the past but with unsatisfactory results.

If you are new to health promotion, please have a look at the “HP-101 Health Promotion Online Course” presented by the Ontario Health Promotion Resource System. This web-based self-study course will help you learn the basic principles of health promotion.

While it focuses on mental health and substance use issues, Culture Counts describes approaches that can be applied to almost any type of health promotion initiative aimed at ethnocultural communities.

How to use this guide

This guide focuses on breaking down the barriers between ethnocultural communities and effective health promotion in mental health and substance use. It does not go into great detail about setting up and running a health promotion initiative. Instead, it provides the basic steps and background with links to other online resources that give more information about each topic. You are strongly encouraged to use these resources to explore issues in health promotion with ethnocultural communities in more depth.

Of course we would like you to read through the guide in its entirety, but each chapter also stands on its own so that you can click on one anytime you need information about a particular issue. Links to each chapter of the guide appear at the bottom of each page.

If you are reading the guide straight through, click on the "Next" link at the bottom of the page to move to the next page.

The guide can also be downloaded as a PDF, which can be read with Adobe Acrobat Reader. Click on the link in the "Related Links" menu on the right to download the PDF file.

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Culture Counts: A Roadmap to Health Promotion