Aloha Everyone:

Wonderful news... the proposal I submitted to have a plenary session at the 2005 National Multicultural Summit has been "provisionally"

accepted... I say provisionally as we are allowed a 1-hour time slot instead of the 2-hours requested in the proposal and this will not be advertised as a Plenary session since the organizers have a major event planned for the end of the summit.

Despite these changes we are absolutely honored to have our program selected among the more than 120 proposals that were submitted... we can format the presentation in such a way as to accomplish the goals of the Town Hall/Plenary meetings that our sub-committee is working on....

Keep in mind that these goals include [1] having persons who are successfully implementing the APA mc Guidelines and/or ACA advocacy/mc competencies in their training programs, research projects, and/or clinical practices briefly present how they are doing this and....

[2] asking persons in the audience to write donw their own commitment for action as well as have some of the audience members publically articulate what they will do in the future after leaving the Summit to implement these guidelines and competencies in their work.

I realize that some of you may think this will be quite a task to accomplish in an hour... but keep in mind that our meeting in Hawaii lasted only an hour and a half and look how much talking, planning ,and mobilizing came from that meeting... I am very confident we can realize a similar level of success in January in California.

I will be inviting a number of persons on the sub-committee to articulate how they are implementing the mc competencies and guidelines at the Summit. If you feel that you have a very creative way that you are implementing these competencies/guidelines/competencies and feel that it would be important to share your work at the Summit... please let me know as well and we will see how we can make it happen.

Also..... the suggestion has been made by Rebecca Toporek to develop an e-book that contains an on-going description of the ways in which colleagues and students our implementing the APA guidelines and ACA competencies in their work... what a fantastic suggestion this is....we will begin to make this idea become a reality and you will all be kept up to date on it... so be thinking of what you will be able to contribute to our first "electronic book" that describes how professionals and students in the field are implementing the guidelines and competencies in their work. Thanks again, Rebecca for this great idea!!

Lastly, we will be having a couple of large and small (subcommittee) NIMC meetings at the Summit in January. Please be thinking of other people you can invite to these meetings so we can further expand the NIMC group and continue our efforts to transform the fields of counseling an psychology in ways that promote a greater level of mental health and well-being in our society.

In the continuing struggle for justice and peace,

Michael D'Andrea

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