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Committee Update 9/7/2004
Dear folks,
Our subcommittee (Miguel Gallardo, Hugh Crethar and Scot Evans) had our first
conference call last week. We began a discussion regarding the objectives
Michael sent to each of us. Our discussion specifically focused on the
following objective:
- Objective: Develop a communication system similar to
Moveon.org that can be used as a political organizing tool in the fields of
counseling and psychology.
Possible action strategy -- In this regard, it would be useful to have APA and
ACA members be able to e-mail a pre-written statement that requests these two
professional organizations to state what they are doing to promote an
aggressive affirmative action policy that is intentionally designed to
increase the extremely low numbers of Latinos/Latinas, African Americans,
Native Americans and Asian Americans in these professional associations (see
the “Multicultural Guidelines … “ (APA, 2003) article with documentation of
these numbers). Can you imagine what would happen if we could get to the
point where 5,000 – 10,000 counselors and psychologists could be mobilized to
address this and other political issues by sending prearranged e-mails to the
appropriate executive director and governing councils of ACA and APA to
address this and other social justice-multicultural issues in our profession.
**** Please note *** The NIMC currently has a website…. It is possible to
integrate this website with one that we developed at the University of Hawaii
(called “ALOHA NOW”). I say this to let individuals know that much of the
groundwork has been done to achieve this objective).
Here is a summary of our discussion and questions that arose as a result:
We all agreed that we do not want to reinvent the wheel. There are many
organizations and individuals doing wonderful work. Like so many have already
mentioned, we need to foster a richer connection between our efforts. We
talked about a “central” website functioning like a “cooperative interlink”
among all individuals/organizations. We agreed that developing one website
for our purposes, in collaboration with the others, would be ideal for the
dissemination and implementation of information. We talked with Scot about
expanding the website that he and his advisor developed:
http://www.vanderbilt.edu/community/psyact/. Please check out this website
if you have not already. More recently, however, Dr. Carlos Zalaquett, being
the technological genius that he is, created an NIMC website that we would
like for you to check out as well:
http://www.coedu.usf.edu/zalaquett/nimc/nimcf.html Please let us know what
you think of this site. We want feedback on how to improve it. Ideally, we
would like to see the leaders of various organization sign-on to doing
something larger and better than what is already being done by each
organization individually. As with many discussion, we ended up having more
questions than answers. With this in mind, we would like your assistance in
beginning stages of this process.
1.) We would like to develop a list of websites that are similar to our
efforts. More specifically, we are looking for websites geared towards
psychologists, counselors, and like-minded, like-spirited organizations. We
had a difficult time identifying criteria for whom to reach out to and what we
should call this group of folks. We are trying to narrow our focus enough to
where we do not have endless numbers of websites, while also remaining
inclusive with regards to folks who are doing similar work with similar
backgrounds. Some examples include: Division 27 of APA, Aloha Now and
Moveon.org. Please send us as many websites as you know who have a similar
focus as our own. Once we have this list, we are going to make efforts to
collaborate with these folks towards the implementation of a central website.
I have already spoken to Carlos about this and he has mentioned to me that
this is possible to do and makes a lot of sense. In addition, we also talked
about having an E-Newsletter that would be sent out to folks from our
website. Any feedback you on have this is appreciated as well.
2.) We also discussed if NIMC is working towards developing into an
association with dues paying members or remain as a clearinghouse for the
dissemination of information and action items for follow through? We actually
preferred the latter and felt that this was the original purpose of the
development of NIMC. If this is the case, what kinds of things should we do
structurally as a clearinghouse? Michael, can you clarify this for us?
Thanks.
Miguel E. Gallardo, PsyD
University of California, Irvine - Counseling Center
President - California Latino Psychological Association
www.latinopsych.org
202 Student Services I
Irvine, CA 92697-2200
Office (949) 824-6457
Fax (949) 824-6586
E-mail:mgallard@uci.edu
*** E-mail is not a secure or confidential medium. Please call me at the
number above to make arrangements to convey or receive confidential data.***
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