Vice President for Practice – Fall 2015

Sherry Benton, Vice President for Practice

Society of Counseling Psychology

During the convention in Toronto in August, several valuable discussions regarding practice have lead to steps to engage practitioners in the next few weeks.  In a meeting with the private practice SIG members generated several ideas.  Several underlying assumptions guided our discussion:

1. While most of the members in SCP have a primary employment in practice, the leadership and active governance is disproportionally members whose primary employment is academic.
2. Members in practice settings were far less likely to have financial support for attending APA meetings or conference making it less likely they would be able to get involved in governance.
3. Practitioners were far less likely to attend convention, apparently perceiving that little of convention pertains to them.
4. SCP has a high need for greater and involvement from the practice constituencies.
5. SCP needs to find more practical and accessible methods of engaging practitioners.

Several steps will be taken in the next few weeks to determine how best to engage practitioners.  We will be sending a very short survey to the SCP membership gauging interest in several potential practitioner activities.   We’ll start by determining who identifies primarily as a practitioner, then we’ll float several ideas including practitioner monthly blogs, CE bearing lunch education and discussion sessions— lunch is loosely defined since we are working with time zones from the east coast to Alaska and Hawaii.   We can also consider practitioner oriented topical discussion forums, and generating practitioner oriented trainings to submit for conventions to make convention more useful and interesting for practitioners.