Facilitating trainees' multicultural development and social justice advocacy through a refugee/immigrant mental health program.

Many counseling theories based on dominant group members (e.g., White, heterosexual, middle class) have failed to address the needs of ethnic and racial minority groups and other historically disempowered individuals (e.g., Jackson, 1995; Sue & Sue, 1999). The significance of professional multicultural sensitivity was brought to the forefront of the field with Sue, Arredondo, and McDavis's (1992) development of the Multicultural Counseling Competencies. These competencies suggest that counselors need to develop awareness of themselves as cultural beings, knowledge of different cultures, and consciousness of the impact of oppression and discrimination on individuals. Furthermore, the guidelines emphasize the need to develop skills in carrying out effective interventions for culturally diverse clients (e.g., Arredondo et al., 1996; Sue et al., 1992). In addition to multicultural models and theories, feminist counseling theories have also highlighted the influence of contextual factors (e.g., political, social, cultural, and economic; e.g., Austad, 2009; Enns, 1997) on clients' lives; however, many, if not most, mental health professionals continue to apply counseling theories solely at the individual level (e.g., Goodman et al., 2004; Matthews & Skowron, 2004; Vera & Speight, 2003). Although individual counseling is beneficial to many clients and issues, it is limited in remediating mental health concerns that may arise from systemic issues in society, such as poverty and discrimination (e.g., Constantine, Hage, Kindaichi, & Bryant, 2007; Fouad et al., 2004; Prilleltensky & Prilleltensky, 2003; Vera & Speight, 2003). This increased attention to systemic influences on mental health has led scholars to urge counselors and other mental health professionals to expand their professional roles beyond the individual level to also include work at other levels, including communities, organizations, and political institutions (Goodman et al., 2004; Prilleltensky & Prilleltensky, 2003; Vera & Speight, 2003). Engagement, social justice activism, or advocacy at such levels is believed to more effectively create social change. Social justice has been defined as "the fundamental valuing of fairness and equity in resources, rights, and treatment for marginalized individuals and groups of people who do not share equal power in society" (Constantine et al., 2007, p. 24). Advocacy refers to activity or action directed toward changing or transforming the process by which public decisions are made, and hence, affecting the political, social, and economic contexts that significantly influence peoples' lives (Cohen, 2001). Some scholars have proposed that social justice advocacy and multicultural competency need to be combined to best serve mental health clients (e.g., Comstock et al., 2008; Crethar, Torres Rivera, & Nash, 2008; Vera & Speight, 2003). Others have pointed out that multicultural competency is deeply intertwined with professionals' ability to engage in social justice advocacy (e.g., Chung, Bemak, Ortiz, & Sandoval-Perez, 2008; Constantine et al., 2007; Kiselica & Robinson, 2001). In 2002, the American Counseling Association (ACA) put forth the ACA Advocacy Competencies (Lewis, Arnold, House, & Toporek, 2002) to provide guidance for counselors in pursuing advocacy work as an ethical aspect of service delivery. These advocacy competencies involve acting with, or on behalf of, oppressed parties on three levels: the client student level, the school-community level, and the public arena. As Lewis et al. (2002) noted, advocating on the client-student level might include empowering a client to use his or her strengths and resources to confront discrimination, or acting on the client's behalf to help him or her gain access to resources. On a community level, advocacy could entail collaborating with organizations to fight social injustices, or working to change unfair policies on a systems level. …