February 19-21, 2020 -Hilton Orrington/Evanston
1710 Orrington Avenue, Evanston, IL
orringtonevanston.hilton.com
Northwestern CAPS is excited to host the 2020 Big 10 Counseling Centers Conference. Please visit the links above to view pricing & registration, and procure lodging.
2020 Conference Theme: Healing, Resisting, & Restoring in Challenging Times
In recent years, college mental health has garnered attention as a public health crisis. With limited resources, college and university counseling centers (UCCs) are tasked with meeting the growing service needs of students with urgent and complex mental health concerns—meanwhile promoting healthy and safe campuses, staff wellness, and ethical practices.
As UCCs strive to address these demands with finite resources, our student communities are becoming more diverse during a period of national and international sociopolitical unrest. Accordingly, addressing students' experiences of oppression and identity-based trauma is essential to the work we do, both inside and outside of the counseling room. Concepts such as “radical healing” (pertaining specifically to racism and racial trauma) compel us to reexamine traditional approaches to coping and focus on the potential for deeper healing through collective hope, resilience, and resistance (French et al., 2019, p.1). Our theme encourages us to share successes and creative solutions to the very real challenges facing UCCs today.
- How can we expand our efforts to offer rapid access and brief interventions without inadvertently dehumanizing our clients and ourselves?
- How can we effectively address the reality of staff burnout?
- How can we best support students and each other as we seek justice in the face of multiple forms of oppression?
- How might we transform our agencies' models of prevention and intervention to prioritize justice and collective healing?