Journal of Counseling & Development ■ Summer2009 ■ Volume87 259

Special Section: Advocacy Competence

©2009bytheAmericanCounselingAssociation.Allrightsreserved.

In the summer of 2001, when I was newly in my role as the president of the American Counseling Association (ACA), Judy Lewis, then immediate past president of ACA, and I had an informal lobby meeting with several people during a conference. Those counselors, some of whom are represented in this special section, discussed the need for counselors to be better advocates for social justice. We also discussed the fact that many of us do not have the skills to be effective ad-vocates. From that discussion came a task force composed of Judy Lewis, Mary Smith Arnold, Reese House, and Rebecca Toporek, whom I charged with the task of developing a set of advocacy competencies that could be used by practitioners as well as by counselor educators and students. Council for Ac-creditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (2001) standards, then and now, include a requirement that advocacy be taught, but we knew of no actual set of compe-tencies. Now they exist. This group developed an outstanding three-dimensional model, available on the ACA Web site (http://www.counseling.org/Publications/).

Although metaphors are always imperfect, they can help us remember and respond in a way that academic terminol-ogy does not always do. I have been using the metaphor of starfish, salmon, and whales to describe these competencies. The starfish represents the client/student; the salmon, the school/community; and the whale, the public arena. (Yes, I know starfish are now called seastars because they are not really fish; however, in the story, the sea star is called a starfish, so I will stick with that term.) Let me elaborate.

The story of the starfish is a familiar one. Briefly, a person walking on a beach is throwing starfish, stranded on the dry sand, back into the ocean. A passerby questions the utility of saving one starfish, given the number of stranded starfish on the beach and on beaches around the world. How could it possibly matter? Throw-ing another back, the person replies, “It matters to this starfish.” When we help individuals, or empower those individuals to help themselves, we are responding at the individual level.

It is well known that salmon in the Pacific Northwest are declining in number because of logging, dams, and power plants, among other things. Dams, even with fish ladders, block access to spawning grounds; the erosion from logging causes muddy runoff that makes water murky, affecting the ability of salmon to find their spawning grounds; and power plants discharge warm water that also affects the ecosystem salmon need to spawn successfully. These issues are repre-sentative of the school/community. We cannot just help one salmon; we need to advocate at the community level to remove dams, reduce logging, and require power plants to cool outflow before discharging it. Only by advocating more broadly will we be successful.

Finally, whales, which migrate throughout the world, are endangered because there is not worldwide agreement either about their scarcity or about the remedies, including a ban on killing. Thus, if we want to save the whales, we must advocate in the global arena, analogous to the public arena level of the Lewis, Arnold, House, and Toporek (2002) model.

Counselors are often considered to be introverted indi-viduals, more comfortable one-on-one or in small groups. If we counselors are to be fair to our students and clients, if we truly want to see a better world for them, if we truly be-lieve that options arise from and are affected by interactions among individuals and the environments in which they find themselves, then we must be advocates. I hope this special section helps you to do just that.

ReferencesCouncil for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational

Programs. (2001). 2001standards. Retrieved February 24, 2009, from http://www.cacrep.org/2001Standards.html

Lewis, J. A., Arnold, M. S., House, R., & Toporek, R. L. (2002). ACAAdvocacyCompetencies. Retrieved February 3, 2009, from http://www.counseling.org/Publications/

Jane Goodman, DepartmentofCounseling,OaklandUniversity.ThisspecialsectiononsocialjusticeadvocacycompetenceisdedicatedtoMarySmithArnoldandReeseHouseinrecognitionoftheirsignificantcontributionstotheACAAdvocacyCompe-tenciesandtheircommitmenttohumanrightsforall.Counselorscontinuetobeinspiredbythemeventhoughtheyaregone.CorrespondenceconcerningthisarticleshouldbeaddressedtoJaneGoodman,715WimbletonDrive,Birmingham,MI48009(e-mail:goodman@oakland.edu).

Starfish, Salmon, and Whales: An Introduction to the Special SectionJane Goodman