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This article highlights social work, critical thinking, and an ethic of care in geriatric teamwork to promote generativity and the well-being of LatinX elderly. We offer the tripartite paradigm of cultural humility, transformative complicity, and empowerment to reduce power imbalances between service providers, elderly persons, and their communities. A force field analysis considers the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act (PPAC) and Accountable Care Organizations (ACO) to understand the restraining and driving forces affecting the institutionalization of inter/transdisciplinary teams. Effective evidence-based models that humanize geriatric services are offered to counter the current biomedical emphasis of Medicare/Medicaid policies and less-than-responsive geriatric institutional and educational systems. We highlight Bloom and Farragher’s Sanctuary Model of compassionate and democratic practices to address the negative effects of moral entrepreneurship and ageism. The case of Florence, an LGBTQ (lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans, and questioning) grandparent with multiple health issues, is analyzed from biomedical, person in the environment, and a strength-based perspective.

Currently, the United States is in crisis with record numbers of homeless or individuals who face inadequate living conditions. Research shows that there is a direct link between the rise of poor living environments and the overall health of a country's population. This awareness is now being addressed by the federal government's re-evaluation of health insurance coverage. The medical and social work professions are looking at alternative delivery models focused on interdisciplinary teams to humanize health care. The paradigms of cultural humility and transformative complicity are offered as important interventions to achieve this goal by strengthening hospital/community engagement. Whereas cultural humility addresses the power imbalance between health provider and patient, transformative complicity attends to our participation in inequity. Taking appropriate action increases our positive transformative potential leading toward more culturally and systemically responsive health care delivery. The case of "Hattie," an elderly African American woman, is discussed to portray actual and recommended interventions.

In social work practice, our ability to demonstrate culturally responsive service delivery has become a perennial challenge. The rapidly changing landscape in the context of cultural and linguistic diversity makes the urgency of establishing culturally inclusive professional practice more necessary. Evidence of its importance can be found in federal directives, state mandates and professional best practice guidelines that are undergirded by a recognition that responsive practice requires an awareness of cultural influences and manifest differences. This is particularly important as efforts to more fully engage with culturally responsive practice coincides with the push for a higher standard for professional caring to be culturally relevant. From a basic social science-informed perspective, culturally based experiences vary in such profound ways, both within and across groups and communities, that limiting practice to common or core sets of cultural meanings or shared practices for practice purposes merely minimizes the complexity of culture. Cultural experiences are experienced and expressed in complex and dynamic ways, and how cultural differences become framed has major implications for how they become recognized and incorporated into socially just practice. Various approaches to cultural sensitivity and institutional attachments appear in the literature although there is a particular need to uncover the many ways that a focus on cultural competence may impair our ability to embrace the ambiguity and uncertainty of cultural differences. Cultural humility offers a perspective that invites tolerance, inclusion, and diversity while promoting transformation, facilitation, and collaboration in knowledge development and in the search for cultural relevance in its social work application. It is a perspective that ultimately invites the sharing of both social opportunities and social fate, and is at the core of socially just empowerment