Hello, CSJ!

I hope this email finds you well and getting ready to enjoy your summer! It was a pleasure meeting with our members at the Town Hall Meeting at the ACA conference back in March. We received so many wonderful ideas from you. Today the CSJ board met and reviewed the notes from the Town Hall Meeting. Our president-elect, Rachael Goodman, drafted a plan for the upcoming year using your input. The board is happy to report that planning is underway! There will be more to report on this after our June meeting, I’m sure, but initial goals have been established:
Goal 1: Increase communication to and among CSJ members,
Goal 2: Increase social justice support and information to members, and
Goal 3: Increase clarity of purpose/roles and engage in long term planning.

To begin addressing these goals, we are researching software to improve our online discussion boards (Goals 1&2), taking steps to offer regular professional development to our members (Goal 2), and have been developing social justice-oriented policy statements, such as the one we released on healthcare (Goal 2). Additionally, the board now has a policies and procedures handbook in place, as well as approved by-laws (Goal 3). In addition, we have established a procedure for developing a CSJ university chapter and you can find information on our website: https://counseling- csj.org/csj-chapters/

Lastly, we are currently taking nominations for the following CSJ board positions: President Elect, Governing Council Representative, Student Representative, Retiree/Limited Means Representative, and Community Representative. Nominations are due to ACA by September 1. You can get details of requirements for each office and let us know if you would like to run for a CSJ board position or if you would like to nominate someone else by contacting Rita Chung at rchung@gmu.edu.

As the secretary, I will be sending out letters like this to you following each CSJ board meeting to keep you informed of what we are doing on behalf of you and the rest of the CSJ membership. And, on behalf of the board, I wish you a peaceful transition from the spring into the summer, whenever that happens for you.

In solidarity,
Lauren Shure
Your CSJ Secretary

Dear CSJ Community,

We are seeking nominations for the following CSJ Leadership positions 2018-2019:

President Elect

Governing Council Representative

Student Representative

Retiree/Limited Means Representative

Community Representative

Please refer to the CSJ website https://counseling-csj.org/about/ under Bylaws for a detailed description of each position, the term, and the roles and responsibilities.

Please email me separately at rchung@gmu.edu if you would like to make a nomination for the position. Please include your full name, ACA member number and your email address.

Hope you have a wonderful summer.
Rita Chi-Ying Chung
Jane Goodman
goodman@oakland.edu

Greetings CSJ Members,

Provided below is a link to the new CSJ Bylaws that were approved last month. You can always them in the “About” Section on the CSJ website.

CSJ Bylaws Adopted 3-16-2017

Greetings CSJ Members!

It is hard to believe that it has already been a week since some of us attended the ACA Conference in San Francisco. We had an amazing time and did some fantastic advocacy work along the way. Here are some of the highlights:

CSJ Board Members held their meeting on Thursday, and as you can see they are a committed and fine looking group. (Full disclosure: a board member wrote this post). Anyway, the Board made a lot of plans and are excited about a lot of great ideas that people have been suggesting.

Friday we held our Annual CSJ Brunch and Award Ceremony (Please see the Awards and Grants page for details on the winners). We had a great time and ate some fantastic food at The City College of San Francisco Culinary School’s restaurant, The Educated Palate. Here are a few photos from the event:

Immediately following our brunch, CSJ held a Town Hall Meeting to find out what others are doing in social justice and how CSJ can be helpful. There were wonderful ideas generated out of this group.

We are very proud to say that CSJ members conducted a mental health workshop in Spanish at El/La Center in San Francisco. “El/La is an organization for transgender Latinas (TransLatinas) that works to build collective vision and action to promote our survival and improve our quality of life in the San Francisco Bay Area.”

CSJ was also proud to sign up as a division co-sponsor for The 4th Annual Rainbow Run 5k & 1 Mile Walk for Wellness & Equality that occurred last Sunday.

CSJ sponsored several sessions throughout the conference, and we received great feedback from people who attended.

The fact that ACA collectively decided to move the conference to San Francisco from Nashville due to the counseling “license to discriminate law” that was passed in Tennessee was not forgotten at this conference. Tennessee Counseling Association President, Kat Coy, spoke about the decision, and how Tennessee counselors are engaged in social justice to protect Tennessee mental health care consumers. ACA also hosted talented and diverse people to educate and entertain us at the conference – further demonstrating our multicultural commitment.

All in all, it was a great conference. If you couldn’t make it this year, we hope to see you next year in Atlanta!

Friday, March 17

1:00pm – 2:30pm

CSJ Featured Session

Program ID #166, Room 2009

Social Justice Counseling and the #BlackLivesMatterMovement

90-Minute Education Session, Advanced

Joseph M. Williams

Counselors should help contest hyper and hostile policing, which adversely affects the mental health and well-being of people from marginalized populations, (especially Blacks) (Turner, 2016). This interactive presentation considers how combining the ACA advocacy competencies and AMCD multicultural and social justice counseling competencies with the #Black Lives MatterMovement can assist counselors in combatting hyper and hostile policing in Black communities.

Saturday, March 18

7:30am – 8:30am

CSJ Featured Session

Program ID #219, Room 3014

Using Parliamentary Procedure and Group Process in the Service of Social Justice

60-Minute Education Session

Jane Goodman, Judy Daniels, Mark Pope

Have you ever been a leader or participant in a meeting governed by Roberts Rules of Order and you did not know how to use parliamentary procedures and an understanding of group process to effectively advocate for your specific position? This session will provide strategies to work in diverse meeting settings to support social justice advocacy efforts. Strategies and role-play scenarios will be presented to demonstrate advocacy skills and the effective use of group process and parliamentary procedures.

Sunday, March 19

10:00am – 10:30am

CSJ Featured Session

Program ID #817, 2nd Floor, Poster Area 3

State and Local Legislative Advocacy: Social Justice in Action

30-Minute Poster Session

Kathryn “Kate” M. Williams

The most important thing to know is that we, in the counseling profession, know more than politician do about mental health. So you don’t have to hesitate any longer to participate in legislative advocacy in your state. To ease any worries or provide answers to your curious questions, in this session, you will learn about ways to participate in legislative advocacy on the state and local level, hear about examples of how it has been done with counselors, educators and students in multiple states, and explore how the Advocacy Competencies fit in.

Sunday, March 19

11:00am – 11:30am

CSJ Featured Session

Program ID #841, 2nd Floor, Poster Area 13

Applying the 2016 ACA Multicultural and Social Justice Competencies: Becoming a Social Justice Counselor

30-Minute Poster Session

Anna Flores Locke, Michaela Ambrosius

This poster session will provide an overview of the new 2016 ACA Multicultural and Social Justice Competencies. It will explore the crucial additions to this document that help guide us in our roles as social justice counselors. Additionally, the session will provide a case study involving an Argentinian Jew to demonstrate how to apply these competencies in counseling practice.