Starfish, salmon, and whales: an introduction to the special section.(Special Section: Advocacy Competence)(Viewpoint essay)

In the summer of 2001, when I was newly in my role as the president of the American Counseling Association (ACA), Judy Lewis, then immediate past president of ACA, and I had an informal lobby meeting with several people during a conference. Those counselors, some of whom are represented in this special section, discussed the need for counselors to be better advocates for social justice. We also discussed the fact that many of us do not have the skills to be effective advocates. From that discussion came a task force composed of Judy Lewis, Mary Smith Arnold, Reese House, and Rebecca Toporek, whom I charged with the task of developing a set of advocacy competencies that could be used by practitioners as well as by counselor educators and students. Council for Accreditation of Counseling and Related Educational Programs (2001) standards, then and now, include a requirement that advocacy be taught, but we knew of no actual set of competencies. Now they exist. This group developed an outstanding three-dimensional model, available on the ACA Web site (http://www.counseling.org/Publications/).

Although metaphors are always imperfect, they can help us remember and respond in a way that academic terminology does not always do. I have been using the metaphor of starfish, salmon, and whales to describe these competencies. The starfish represents the client/student; the salmon, the school/community; and the whale, the public arena. (Yes, I know starfish are now called sea stars because they are not really fish; however, in the story, the sea star is called a starfish, so I will stick with that term.) Let me elaborate.

The story of the starfish is a familiar one. Briefly, a person walking on a beach is throwing starfish, stranded on the dry sand, back into the ocean. A passerby questions the utility of saving one starfish, given the number of stranded starfish on the beach and on beaches around the world. How could it possibly matter? Throwing another back, the person replies, "It matters to this starfish." When we help individuals, or empower those individuals to help themselves, we are responding at the individual level.

It is well known that salmon in the Pacific Northwest are declining in number because of logging, dams, and power plants, among other things. Dams, even with fish ladders, block access to ...