Multicultural Advocacy

Multicultural education and social advocacy among human service professionals have gained momentum in the United States over the past several decades due to an increase of diverse populations across race, nationalities, age, and socioeconomic status. Statistics demonstrate significant changes within the counseling profession as shifting its focus and strategies to attend to counselor and client cultural differences. The U.S. population at nearly 313 million is expected to increase by the year 2050 to 438 million individuals with a notable decrease in percentages of Whites, non-Hispanic, non-Latino, steady proportion of Black African origin, and increases for Hispanic, Latino, and Asian descent residents. Cultural competence is marked by counselors’

For instance, the writers suggested that developing multicultural counseling competence demands a systems approach to working with persons from diverse backgrounds. The authors posit that altogether improved practice concerning social justice and advocacy requires knowledge awareness surrounding the attitudes and skills practitioners need in self-reflection, identifying, and overcoming biases, in which individual, family, community, and historical systems connect that constitute cultural identities. For example, theory, values, actual application of principles and practice, and research pilot one another to reinforce the notions about what multiculturally competent counselors are made up of and what makes for culturally appropriate treatment (Hays & Erford, 2014). The researchers noted two key issues going forward in multicultural counseling. The one being disputes about what multicultural is or constitutes among research studies. And the second being a set of systems problem issues in research design as the quality of being factually sound and excessive dependence on cross-racial research involving comparisons between two or more cultures or cultural groups in to which the authors refer to in their book as primarily descriptive. As multicultural and social justice advocacy counselors contemplate the sample of research topics and common plan of action for greater culturally suitable research and collective inquiry by which researchers and persons or groups join forces to verify and boost the logically sound findings, it becomes more supportive and indispensable (Hays & Erford). Having a shared understanding of these factors that are nonbiased and based on empirical research allow counselors to engage more advanced competencies for the