This paper discusses community psychology programs which serve members of alternate cultures and are based on the premises that: (1) individuals may possess desirable behaviors that are suppressed by their environmental context; (2) conventional behavioristic methods are inadequate for assessment; and (3) an interdisciplinary approach is needed to design effective programs. A multidisciplinary strategy employed by the Kamehameha Early Education Program, a K-3 program for Polynesian-Hawaiian children, is described in which desirable behavior repertoires are discovered, rather than created, by multidisciplinary methods, and the school, rather than the child, is modified to encourage the desirable behavior. Examples of this strategy illustrate the use of ethnography to discover that behaviors desired in school are also present in the home. Modification of the school environment to approximate the cue-functions of the home is discussed. Sociolinguistics, the study of social parameters which affect language use, is offered as a strategy for designing a school environment conducive to language development. Linguistics, dialect, and discourse analysis are presented as methods for exploring the children's use of pidgin speech. The discovery of preexistant repertoires is identified as a first step in designing effective intervention strategies. (NRB)