Counseling Center Mission Statement
As part of DASA’s effort to promote the success of the whole student, the University Counseling Center believes that a healthy emotional life is the foundation for personal, academic, and professional success. Honoring individual differences, core human values, and the complexities of collegiate life, our counselors use compassionate, professional interactions to support emotional balance while encouraging students to reach their potential.Our mission is realized through the delivery of comprehensive services, such as:
- Brief individual, group, and couples counseling
- Psychiatric evaluation and treatment
- 24-hour crisis response
- Campus and community referrals
- Faculty, staff, and student consultation
- Mental health educational programming
Counseling Center Values Statement
We commit to the values of Community, Cultural Humility, Accountability, Compassion and Quality of Care. We strive to live these values as an investment in our individual and collective well-being so that we may better serve the mission of the Counseling Center.
Provide culturally-appropriate, competent care that is equitable and accessible to students.
Quality of Care Operationalized:
- ensure services are accessible and equitable as well as effective
- safe
- student-centered – attuned to and focused on the student
- meets needs across the prevention to crisis spectrum
- culturally appropriate and culturally affirming
- trained in serving diverse populations and using cultural humility
- trauma informed
- current student and staff need is priority over productivity
Live our values, engage with transparency, promote safety, and build trust so that all feel like they belong and are empowered to speak up. We are stronger as a collective.
Community Operationalized:
- a group of people with a shared sense of place with commonalities such as norms, values, customs, and identity that embrace diversity and do not default to white ways of being
- a sense of belonging to a group
- used to bring about change or undertake change together
- sense of cohesion, safety, and trust
- recognize the strengths and weaknesses
- promote participative processes that empower the whole
- uphold values
- care about one another
- sense of being more impactful as a whole rather than as many individuals with shared goals or purpose
Continually examine our own biases, acknowledge that others are experts of their own cultures, and recognize the impact of our behaviors on others.
Cultural Humility Operationalized:
- maintain an interpersonal stance that is other-oriented
- self-humility
- acknowledge that we don’t know everything about other cultures/identities or how our behavior affects others
- must examine our own values and that is a lifelong process
- own biases that get in the way of seeing others’ cultures and perspectives
Act with integrity, take responsibility for our actions, and follow through with commitments that bring us back in line with our values both individually and communally.
Accountability Operationalized:
- act with integrity
- live our values
- be responsible
- take ownership
- being answerable for oneself
- prioritize values
- follow through on commitments
- hold each other accountable
Respond thoughtfully to others and demonstrate caring and concern at all times but especially in times of distress.
Compassion Operationalized:
- kindness, caring, and concern for another
- we care about one another and ourselves, and respond to members in distress