College Counseling Center Outreach—An Organizing Framework

ABSTRACT

While outreach has long been considered an important component of counseling center efforts, the increasing demands for clinical services, along with increased severity and acuity of presenting concerns, pose a challenge for centers that also aim to incorporate a robust outreach effort into their overall services. Outreach has been defined and implemented in such a way that it encompasses a complex variety of activities in response to the needs of various constituencies. Therefore, some organization of outreach efforts and the priorities they address may help counseling center directors and outreach coordinators in an increasingly resource-strained profession. This article introduces an organizing framework of four Levels of Outreach, with distinct goals and functions for each outreach level to facilitate goal setting, aiming to assist toward more efficient resource management by counseling center and student affairs administrators and more purposeful implementation of overall outreach strategies.

KEYWORDS:

• Campus life
• college mental health
• community intervention
• counseling center
• education
• organizing framework
• outreach

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. For the purposes of this discussion, a distinction is suggested between clinical consultation, typically focused on particular clinical situations or involving discreet individuals of concern in a campus community, and outreach consultation, involving the broader consultative interactions between counseling center staff and members of the campus community and related to efforts to impact the campus or particular communities around mental health and student development issues).

2. While the dynamics of the current “Me Too” movement highlighting the prevalence of sexual assault in our society certainly have similarities to the outreach efforts described here, they are not related, noting that the “Me Too” activities described here took place beginning in 2008.