This oral history website repository was created to honor many significant contributors to our field. We want to preserve their legacy and the opportunity for all to know these leaders personally and professionally. Each interview is in their own words. The expertise of our interviewees ranges from prevention to treatment interventions, from counseling to supervision, and from daily practice to multicultural awareness. The following are some excerpts from our interviews:

From Patricia Arredondo's interview: "Whether it's school counseling, or whether it's an educator, or the people who are involved in family counseling, what I believe it becomes more important is to see how the integration across these specialty areas and settings is becoming more and more necessary. You can't just treat the child who's being bullied in a school setting without treating the family, without looking at the system in which this bullying is taking place, without looking at the larger context of society that allows, or in some ways has permitted bullying to take place with certain types of children. So I think that as the profession, we are moving, or needing to move in a way that there is more transparency across our specialties, across the settings, and more interdependent."

From Paul Pedersen's interview: "Stop spending all your time with persons who think, act, dress, and behave like yourself. Start spending time with people who are different from yourself so that you can become better prepared to work in a future culture that will be different beyond anything we can now imagine. Behaviors have no meaning outside the cultural context where those behaviors are learned and displayed."

From Rebecca Toporek's interview: "I also was fortunate to find mentors nationally, both in person and via their writing. In particular, Janet Helms's work was pivotal in my development early on when I was first trying to learn about this cultural group and that cultural group. The workshops and books kept saying you have to learn about yourself first, and I kept thinking "well, that's an excuse; they just don't know the answers." Then, I came across Janet's material about interactions of racial identities between the counselor and the client, and all of a sudden I understood why self-awareness was so important. It was kind of a 'point of no return' feeling."