Thursday, August 10: Afternoon keynote with Maurice Bulls
MI Through the Lens of Cultural Humility and Anti-Racism
The impact of culture, racism and stigma on one’s experience and behavior are often overlooked. Being culturally humble can go a long way in understanding how our client’s culture, values and experiences of “isms” influence behavior change. Cultural humility is a lifelong process of self-reflection, self-critique, assessment of power imbalances and the development of mutually respectful relationships and partnerships. We will discuss the three principles, as well as types of racism and the impacts of stigma. We will address how it is essential to have a lens of cultural humility and anti-racism and ways in which it can be infused in the practice of MI.
Learning objectives:
- Identify principles of cultural humility, types of racism and elements of stigma and how it can influence behavior.
- Recognize the value of integrating cultural humility and anti-racism frameworks into our repertoire as MI practitioners and trainers.
Guest speakers

Ali Hall, JD
Ali has designed and facilitated thousands of Motivational Interviewing workshops for behavioral health and substance use recovery providers, mental health practitioners, health care providers, child and family services providers, wraparound providers, senior service providers, criminal justice professionals, psychologists and psychiatrists and provides training for trainers in evidence-based practices. Ali regularly provides skills development coaching for interdisciplinary health provider teams and is the codeveloper of the Motivational Interviewing Competency Assessment (MICA), a coding and coaching tool for MI skill improvement. Ali is the coauthor of the book Motivational Interviewing for Mental Health Clinicians: A Toolkit for Skills Enhancement (2021).
Ali is a member of the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers (MINT), a MINT-certified trainer and an independent consultant and trainer. Ali currently serves on the MINT Board of Directors, focusing on professional skill development for MI practitioners and trainers. Ali served as a Lead Trainer in multiple years for the International MINT Training for New Trainers (TNT).
Read Ali’s full bio on the interactive Canvas conference guide when you register.

Maurice Bulls, MEd
Maurice Bulls is the executive director of Behavior Change Consulting and also serves as lead trainer, program developer and MI coach. He is an active member in the Motivational Interviewing Network of Trainers. His current focus is on adapting MI to map to the language of minority clients and staff. Maurice’s graduate work focused on cooperative learning, an evidence-based system for teaching students in small group settings, using highly specified instructional strategies to encourage students to work together in teams towards a common goal while helping each other learn. He has expanded the MI workshops to incorporate these strategies as well as fun, interactive training activities. In addition, Maurice has over 22 years of experience in inner city school settings and has been involved in manual development for new interventions. He is currently working on a book concentrating on the areas of cultural humility and anti-racism strategies to assist counselors and therapists to better understand their clients.