Our relationships at work are as much a combination of conceptual systems and personal interactions as any of our other relationships. What we think about our colleagues, what we say to them, and how we behave towards them are sustained in patterns of behavior that feel like authentic expressions of our core selves, unchangeable and fixed.
Each time we work with someone new, we assess them, based on our past experiences, and then make assumptions about them. Four million years of evolution have honed this skill, and it usually serves us well.

However, our tendency to generalize in this way sometimes leaves us judgmental and suspicious; justifying our current prejudices with anecdotes from the past.
Traditionally, cultural awareness training has focused on acquiring knowledge about minority ethnic groups and about the law; Government Acts and local policies, what constitutes good and bad manners, cultural taboos and religious sensitivities, and so on.
What health and social care commissioners and providers are increasingly finding, however, is that this does not work when superimposed over existing prejudices. Practice does not change.
By offering its training alongside facilitators from black and minority ethnic (bme) groups, Zenofylia is able to provide an environment where misconceptions about ethnicity can be explored openly. The opportunity to interact one-to-one with individuals from a wide range of cultural backgrounds allows prejudices to be dissolved.