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Greetings and Welcome - Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development
Greetings and Welcome to AMCD 2007-2008
Greetings! Welcome to the 2007-08 AMCD program year. The theme for this year is, "Ore Ire," a Yoruba term from the Nigerian people of West Africa that roughly translates as, "re-aligning our heads." My intent, in using this term, is to encourage AMCD members to re-focus, re-vitalize, and re-commit to the fundamental principles of our organiation.
My hope is that we will all contribute to a more bountiful and scholarly year for all of the AMCD members and the clients that we serve. To that end, I am confident that each of us will do our part to make our dreams, as an organization, become reality. Noted below are this year's organizational goals. I believe that these issues are critical for the continued success of AMCD.
As president of AMCD, my goals are to reinvigorate the primary and historical mission of the organization. As such, the following objectives have been established for this year.
- We seek to augment and disseminate knowledge based upon both theory and praxis that impacts the psychological wellbeing of culturally diverse clients. To accomplish this task, it is important to first increase involvement of the overall ACA membership because multicultural issues are embedded in all interactions. Thus, all counselors need to increase multicultural competence. Either through direct involvement as AMCD members or through advocacy in other ACA divisions, each ACA member can forward the AMCD mission and thus impact the clients we serve. Our primary goal this year is to increase membership by at least 20%.
- This necessitates coalition-building efforts within AMCD among the various cultural concerns groups and between AMCD and other ACA organizations. Moreover, it becomes important to augment capacity building through partnerships with external organizations that have goals similar to AMCD. This year, we seek to create formal alliances with at least 2 ACA divisions and 2 external organizations through joint projects.
- Our third division goal is to concentrate on nurturing the current and future professionals within the division. Culturally diverse graduate students and early career faculty are in need of a collegial circle of scholars that serves as a resource for professional development. We will reinstitute and revitalize our existing mentoring, leadership, and professional development programs to attract and retain our richest resource: emergent scholars and practitioners.
- Fourth, this year we will focus on structured research activities, such as regional symposia, funded research projects, research awards at all academic and professional levels, and think tanks.
- Finally, community outreach will become a priority within our division. AMCD's foundational premise is that aware professionals take action in order to advocate for themselves as well as their clients. We will follow up on our outreach endeavors in South Africa and Botswana with specific collaborative activities.
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