RT: Boy that's a big question. So many different directions we could go with that... It depends on the time in my life. Right now some of it is being a parent to a four year old and six year old.

R: Yeah...(smiles)... so that defines a lot, and also being a partner. In addition, I balance that with being an educator in a master's program in an area where the students are almost all going to be practitioners in colleges or mental health settings. I'm specifically in the college and career area but I teach over the whole master's program. I'm newly taking over the coordinator position for the career specialization and part of that is reaffirming my career counseling identity, which has been an interesting relationship over my professional life. It was one of those happenstance fields that I ended up in. A number of times I sort of veered away from it but I always get drawn back to it. It seems that I am meant to be here.

RT: I was born in Winnipeg but when I was three we moved to the States for my dad's job. We moved because my Dad got a job at Iowa State University. So I grew up in Iowa, and... this is a really long story but its part of the way I respond when people ask why I'm in multicultural counseling as a White person. We were transplanted into Iowa, still Canadian; and I never really quite felt like I fit in Iowa. My parents maintained a socialist perspective and tried to integrate international friends and students into our lives. In addition, dealing with mental health issues in my family, the gender bias in the mental health system, and trying to understand human relationships and human beings in general was part of what led me to psychology. I later returned to Winnipeg as an undergraduate but didn't really fit there either. I decided I needed to move west.

When I was in my master's program at the University of Oregon, I came to really enjoy community college counseling. It was a good fit for me in terms of being in an academic environment, but also working with people who had really wide economic diversity and wide life experiences; wide range of life experiences. I was committed to doing community college counseling when I completed my degree and moved to the San Francisco Bay Area. However, I found that my counseling training didn't include adequate multicultural training. So, I started trying to put together my own training. It was a struggle because I like to be more comprehensive, to see where I'm going, and what I'm doing; but it felt like I was just putting pieces together. I was very, very, fortunate to find some really good mentors at the college who were willing and able to challenge me, personally and professionally and help guide me personally and professionally.

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. I think it was about that time, I attended a regional conference where Derald Wing Sue and Michael D'Andrea were presenting; and maybe even Thomas Parham, Patricia Arredondo, Don Locke and Alan Ivey. They were encouraging people to get involved with ACA (American Counseling Association) to advocate for multicultural counseling. I'd never attended ACA or been involved at all, but I was really inspired by them, inspired by the team that they made up, and inspired by what they were trying to do. So, I attended the ACA convention that year in Minneapolis. I felt sort of alienated from ACA for most of that convention; however, during the AMCD (Association for Multicultural Counseling and Development) luncheon I accepted Patricia Arredondo's open invitation to work on the Professional Standards Committee with her resulting in the Operationalization of the Multicultural Competencies document. She has been such a wonderful mentor. In addition, I was able to arrange to have Derald Wing Sue come do some ongoing training with our staff in the community college. Between the two of them I started to feel really connected nationally with multicultural counseling. This, coupled with my colleagues in the community college really challenging me continuously, helped me to try to develop as a person.

After nine years as a professional, first as a coordinator in a welfare-to-work program and then as a community college counselor and administrator, I decided that I really needed to go back to school and get a Ph.D. I wanted more comprehensive multicultural training and I wanted to learn how to address, at a more national level, some of the systemic problems I saw my students facing. I eventually entered the doctoral program at the University of Maryland, because I wanted to study with Dr. Janet Helms and Dr. Don Pope-Davis. In addition to their mentorship, I also gained a lot from informal student mentors in the program and the research team with Don.

Some other things that happened were... how to put this exactly... my views about the role of advocacy in counseling were challenged as began the transition into counseling psychology from counseling. Given my experience as a counselor, especially with refugee students and students with very little income, and homeless, my view of what the role of a counselor extended to counseling psychology. This resulted in some conflicts including differing views about the role of advocacy and social action in counseling as well as conflicts around the distinction between counseling and counseling psychology.

After I completed my pre-doctoral and post-doctoral internships at U.C. Berkley in the Counseling and Psychological Services, by some miracle, a job opened up at San Francisco State University in career counseling, community college counseling, and multicultural counseling. It feels like a perfect fit in terms of the department, the university, and the students.

I know this is really long, but maybe it covers some of the other questions later, but I mentioned the career counseling piece and I know that that's not been in the story at all. When I first was in my master's program, by chance, I did a summer practicum in the Bay Area at a non-profit career center and gained basic training in resume writing job search, interviewing, and all of that. So that sort of ended up being my trade and it was a big part of getting the community college jobs. When I went to Maryland, I thought that I would shift to a more general focus but I was hired to coordinate and supervise the university's career planning courses. I think it's funny that the job offer from San Francisco State University was again career counseling. So now I'm at the point of saying "okay, okay, already, I'm a career counselor". Philosophically, I'm completely there; and so I have this split between general multicultural social justice work and more specifically those issues in career counseling.

RT: Well, differences with colleagues were a major issue but there are certainly others. My own limitations have been barriers as well as things that have helped me to grow. Just as an example, I mentioned I became an administrator for a while in a community college. Before that time I had worked really hard at developing multicultural competence both personally and professionally. However, as the Associate Dean, I don't think I was able to translate my multicultural competence as a practitioner into being multiculturally competent as an administrator. I didn't understand the power dynamics or what it really meant for me to move into that position or how to maintain the close relationships with the staff of color who were my allies. It was really hard on the personal relationships I had developed, and I felt like it was really sort of destroying a lot of the personal work that I had done. That's just one example of how my own limitations are certainly a barrier that will be a constant area of growth.

RT: I'm humbled by that question. I'm not quite sure how to answer because the things that I've been able to do feel more like contributing to group efforts. The book came about through my interest in "advocating for advocacy" and the need to make sure that multicultural issues remained central in social justice efforts both in ACA and APA. Within the Society for Counseling Psychology, a small group of us put together a roundtable session on social justice and multiculturalism for the APA Convention. Afterward, we said, "well, we have all these great papers that people have done, how hard can it be to turn it into a book?" This, incidentally, is very hard.

RT: The book is amazing to me because it has so many examples of people doing good work. It was a way for me to help pull together and show the work that other people are doing; especially because I'm at a point in my life where I don't feel like I'm able to do very much of that because of my kids and my family responsibilities. So, it was a way for me to highlight all the things that other people were doing and inspire me as well as others to take action on really important issues.

RT: Well, before the workshop that was so inspirational with Michael, Patricia, and Derald, and all of them, the thing that hit me was the work in the welfare-to-work program. I was hired by the community college but I was supposed to be a liaison between the Department of Social Services and the community college. Being in the Bay area, there was a diverse student body; and, because I was working specifically with people receiving public assistance, I saw a lot of the economic challenges that they had. I really saw the difficulty that they had in terms of maintaining and getting ahead. Just as an example, a student whose tire would blow out every other week, and she only had enough money to buy another bald tire; so that tire would blow out the next week and it would just keep happening. You see systemically how being in a place of poverty keeps you in a place of poverty.

Also, when I first moved to the Bay Area, I had applied to a tenure track position in a community college and was told that they really liked me but that they needed to hire a Vietnamese counselor. At the time, I was living with a bunch of engineers who said, "how can you defend affirmative action now? You know you didn't get this job simply because you're White". What surprised me was how easy it was to explain to them that the other candidate and I were not equivalent, regardless of what I was told. She was much more qualified than I was because she spoke Vietnamese. She was able to work with the Vietnamese student population, and they were 11% of the college. We were not on equal footing. For me that was kind of a fundamental shift in understanding how the system was unequal in the way that it described who was qualified. Being able to explain that, I think, made a big shift for me.

RT: I know for sure that some of it was my own limitations as I said. I've always been a fairly shy person, so that made it a little bit difficult in scenarios where I don't know other people, and trying to educate myself I was putting myself in a lot of situations where I didn't know very many other people. But, you know, I think I was really, really, fortunate to get into a lot of groups that were very welcoming. They were very welcoming and, at the same time, were willing to ask me why I was there given that I was one of the only White people. I think having to explain it a number of times to people helped me really try to understand myself why I was there. This is not to say that I didn't have challenging situations, you know times where I said something without thinking and somebody challenged me and then I got horribly embarrassed and had to spend two to three days recovering, and then learn from the experience.

Another challenge came when a group of colleagues and I tried to confront an organization I was working for about a pattern of discrimination and hostile environment reported by students of color, women, and students with disabilities. The legal action taken against us by another staff member, as well as the response of the organization was a significant challenge but also an important learning experience.

RT: I think it's at a really exciting time, because it seems that multiculturalism is much more able to look at culture from a more complex perspective. One of the really significant experiences I had was working on a qualitative study of client's experiences in multicultural counseling, and how clients defined multicultural competence. The most significant thing that came out of that study is that it's very complex and that it's not the same for every client. There are so many variables that go into how a client responds to multicultural competence or incompetence. I always go back to that when teaching and when doing anything else, it's a very complex process and can't be broken down to simple demographic variables or even matching variables. I feel like the field is at the point of really trying to address some of those complexities; multiple identities and how much people identify with different identities and the interactions of identities, and all of those different aspects. I think one of the difficulties right now is in really trying to establish a research base, because these variables are so complex.

With the social justice movement, so many people are using that term without a common definition of what that means. Early in the multicultural field that that also seemed to happen. It seems like kind of a parallel process with social justice. One of the things that needs to happen is to really begin to establish what are we talking about when we talk about social justice and how do we use that in a way that doesn't just validate anything that anybody is doing that happens to help people. Also, we really need to learn how to be interdisciplinary in the work that we do because these problems are so huge that if we're going to address it everybody has to work together.

RT: What I would really like to see happen, is that both within multiculturalism and social justice, we gain an ability to work across disciplines and across experiences so that we are able to work much more collaboratively with communities. Also, we need to collaborate with other areas like social work, public health, which are some of the other fields that have been doing some aspects of social justice for awhile.

The other thing I've been doing is talking to students about training and social justice, and what do they think they really need in their training in order to be able to do that. Overall, it seems that the biggest difficulty students have is integrating social justice into their practice, into the way they approach their work. Another fantasy I have is that basic or traditional theories would be taught from a multicultural and systemic perspective. Imagine if you could teach cognitive behavioral theory from a systemic multicultural social justice perspective, if you could teach psychodynamic from that kind of perspective, if in all the courses, in the theories courses, social justice and multiculturalism were completely integrated into the theory. I think it could be done. Then, I think we would be integrate in a way that doesn't feel like social justice and advocacy is an add-on, it's something you do after your work day or above and beyond the work you do, that you would actually be able to do it with clients.

RT: The advice that I would have is to become familiar with the competencies and also to engage in self-evaluation. One of the things that I started working on is an online multicultural and social justice training tool that will be in the public domain for human service professionals, educators and students to use to assess where they are in terms of their multicultural competence and then design a professional development plan to help go a little bit further. This could be used over a lifetime to really encourage lifelong learning and development. I also think that people need to make sure that they find mentors and allies who are similar and different from themselves culturally and who are at a more sophisticated level in terms of cultural competence. It is important that these mentors and allies are able and willing to challenge on a very personal and professional level.

I have so much more to learn myself and think it is a constant and lifelong challenge that we need to engage in.