Multiracial Recruitment in the Field of Family Therapy: An Innovative Training Program for People of Color

Abstract

This article describes the creation of a training program designed to increase the number of family therapists of color in the family therapy field. In 1992, a partnership between New York City schools of social work, community agencies, and the Ackerman Institute for the Family created the Diversity and Social Work Training Program. Elements critical to the program's success were recruitment strategies, mentorships, partnerships with outside organizations, provision of a long-term institutional commitment, biracial collaborations, and institutional change. This article describes the design, structure, and process of this program's evolution and its impact 12 years later.

Mentorship in Family Therapy Training Programs: Students’ and New Graduates’ Perspectives

“…The intentional pairing of mentors and protégés has been used to promote common interests, job functions, organization's goals, and recruitment (Finkelstein & Proteet, 2010;Kaplan & Small, 2005). However, most professional mentoring relationships are informal (Noe, 1988), and develop spontaneously by mutual consent (Ragins & Cotton, 1999).…”

Alterity Models in Counseling: When We Talk About Diversity, What Are We Actually Talking About?

“…Within the field of counseling and related fields there have been calls for advancing structural diversity for counselor education faculty (Shin 2008), counselors-in-training (Shin et al 2011), psychologists-in-training (Rogers and Molina 2006), and family therapists-in-training (Kaplan and Small 2005). Within an increasingly diverse society, it is important for the field of counseling to increase representation of persons from traditionally under-represented groups within its ranks.…”

Thematic review of family therapy journals in 2005

“…Kaplan and Small (2005) found that recruitment strategies, mentorships, partnerships with outside organizations, provision of a long-term institutional commitment, biracial collaborations and institutional change were key components of their programme for increasing the recruitment of people from ethnic minorities into their family therapy training programme in the USA. Divac and Heaphy (2005) described an approach to building cultural competence into family therapy training.…”

“…There were a few significant papers on training and diversity (Divac and Heaphy, 2005;Kaplan and Small, 2005;Singh, 2005). Kaplan and Small (2005) found that recruitment strategies, mentorships, partnerships with outside organizations, provision of a long-term institutional commitment, biracial collaborations and institutional change were key components of their programme for increasing the recruitment of people from ethnic minorities into their family therapy training programme in the USA.…”