In this Issue:
Vo lu me 3 , Issu e 2
F all 2015
A NOTE FROM
THE CLINIC COORDINATOR.… 1
Be A Better You!
ASPIRE RESEARCH:
FINANCIAL THERAPY TEAM TO STUDY COUPLES ….2 ASPIRE IMPACT: EMBRACING DIVERSITY...3 & 4 ASPIRE CLINIC HAPPENINGS….5
ASPIRE Clinic
The ASPIRE Clinic, a collaborative unit of the College of Family and Con‐ sumer Sciences at the University of Georgia, is a unique resource that provides counseling and education services to UGA and the Athens community, as well as innovative educational and research opportunities to UGA students.
From the Clinic Coordinator
I
n this issue of the newsletter, I wanted to communicate grate‐ fulness for the continued support and recognition that the AS‐ PIRE Clinic has received from the College of Family and Consum‐ er Sciences, our community collaborators, and our on‐campus refer‐ ral network. With the exposure has come so many wonderful oppor‐ tunities to serve the communities of UGA and Athens in our unique and innovative way. The Clinic has taken on new research endeavors and has continued its outreach efforts with great success. As the Coordinator, I take immense pride in the work that we do here—and feel endlessly inspired by our student service providers, faculty, and staff. Enjoy!
Keep Aspiring!
Megan Ford
ASPIRE to improve your... SELF
RELATIONSHIPS FINANCES
HOME
NUTRITION
HEALTH
LEGAL SITUATION
acquiring strategies for personal improvement and relationship enhancement
ASPIRE Research: A first-of-its-kind financial study to examine couples’ reactions to money
The Interdisciplinary Team From left: Stephen Kuzniak, Megan Ford, Dr. John Grable, Ally DeGraff, Bruce Ross, & Michael Thomas
The popular media talks in length on the issue of financial conflict in couples, which has prompted researchers and practitioners at UGA’s ASPIRE Clinic to learn more. A team of financial therapists (a new hybrid discipline combining skills in both financial planning and therapy/ counseling) has been recruiting couples this year to participate in a study to examine how they respond to financial conversations—specific topics discussed include financial goals, current financial behaviors, their experience of money in their family of origin, the couple’s view on their financial interactions, as well as money’s impact on the relationship.
Financial Planning student, Michael Thomas, and Marriage and Family Therapist & ASPIRE Clinic Coordinator, Megan Ford, conduct a mock session with the research team.
The team will conclude data collection in December and the outcomes of the exploratory study will be shared in a future issue of the ASPIRE Clinic Newsletter. To see more of the story featured in FACS Magazine, check out http://www.fcs.uga.edu/news/story/moneytalk-study-analyzes-couples-financial-communication
The current study will measure each couple’s reactions to stress within facilitated financial conversations using physiological equipment, which collect data on the participants’ heart rate, skin temperature, and galvanic (sweat) response. The research team experiments with the device (above).
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ASPIRE Impact: Embracing Diversity in Athens By: Megan Barfield & Allie Carlson Our diverse Athens community is continuing to embrace new families and new cultures. We interviewed our Spanish-speaking therapists to learn more about bilingual therapy and how they are responding to the growth of the Latino community.
Q: What experiences drew you to bilingual therapy?
my skills to help these people that I really like and really care about.’
Ashley: I lived in Venezuela and Honduras for periods of time and learned Spanish there—I loved the language and the culture and wanted to be able to work with people in that community. I recently read a paper that said our memories are stored in our brain with the language that they happened in, so I think it’s really important to be able to speak client’s language and meet them where they’re at.
Stephanie: For me, it’s a social justice issue to be able to provide bilingual therapy. When people come in and they’re distressed and only able to express themselves in their own language, I feel very strongly that even if it might not be the language that I speak, I need to do my best to accommodate them so that I can work best with them. It makes it easier for them to disclose things if they can do so in their own language.
Jason: I studied abroad and I had an awesome time experiencing the culture and learning the language. When I got back to the US after having lived in Mexico for years and building relationships there, I realized that more and more people are immigrating. Northern California is more than 40% Latin American and it’s as high as 55% south of Los Angeles. That’s enormous—it’s the majority! And there just aren’t that many therapists who are doing bilingual therapy to accommodate these populations.
Q: How do you feel you currently impact the Spanish -speaking community in Athens or will impact this community in the future?
Ashley: I hope to have an impact, but I don’t know for sure that I will. I think for a lot of people who don’t fit the dominant group— their voices are silent. I want to be able to hear what the Spanishspeaking clients want and need as opposed to imposing a certain Stephanie: I realized that speaking multiple languages would be idea about what I think people need, because I don’t know. helpful when I interned as an undergraduate. I was a psychology major and I interned at an inpatient psychiatric unit for kids at Jason: I would ideally like to have all Spanish speaking clients Seattle Children’s Hospital. There were many ethnicities and peo- because my Spanish is really strong and most therapists here do ple from different countries that were there getting care in the not speak Spanish. I want to use that in a way that serves the compsych unit. They had interpreters, but I noticed that it was so much munity. I also am going to be doing research with families, I go to easier for me to directly interact with the Spanish-speaking pa- some Latino UGA meetings, and I help with interpretation during tients (I was minoring in Spanish). So that is what started me some parent-teacher meetings at a middle school, so I try to do as down the track of realizing, ‘You know what, it’s actually more many activities as I can to help. effective to speak people’s languages,’ so that initially drew me and I have had other experiences that cemented that since. Stephanie: I think now is the perfect opportunity to impact the
Q: Why is it important to do bilingual therapy? Ashley: I love the Latino community; I really love everything about it. There is a pretty big Spanish-speaking population here in Athens, so I think for me it’s about access - allowing services to a broad range of people who don’t always have access to services. So much of what we do is in English, but you can only reach a certain amount of people if you only focus on that language. Jason: This group comes in with a lot of needs… they have problems and there are just a lack of services. I thought, ‘I have to use
community in Athens because there are three of us (Spanishspeaking therapy service providers) here at ASPIRE. I think that the Spanish-speaking community doesn’t have a lot of access to services in their own language - and I’m not just talking about therapy services. For example, medical care, the court system, and all of the different systems people have to go through every day. Even in public schools, I don’t know how many people really speak Spanish, so I think it will be important to have them feeling that they have someone to advocate for them or at least someone who understands them at a deeper level.
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Embracing Diversity Q: Do you have any personal or professional goals or plans regarding continuing work with the Spanishspeaking community?
providing equal care for Spanish-speaking clients. I think they have unique challenges here in the state of Georgia and elsewhere in the States. A goal of mine is to integrate my language proficiency with learning how I can advocate for them at perhaps a policy level.
Ashley: It’s a lifelong hope for me to always be able to offer Spanish services, here or anywhere. All of my interests are focused Do you have any words of wisdom for those interaround the Latino community, so I want to work with them in terms ested in bilingual therapy? or research and teaching and workshops, things of that nature.
Q:
Jason: I would like to ultimately create a clinic that is right in the heart of a Spanish-speaking community and maybe one that can be a walk-in clinic. Most people haven’t heard of walk-in therapy, but a clinic where you don’t have to make an appointment, where you can just come in and you have bilingual therapists waiting there with very low fees so you can get services more readily. I would also like to integrate Spanish more into curriculum: have classes about doing therapy in Spanish because it is the fastest growing population in this country. My career is going to be about making the mental health community in this country a lot better. Stephanie: My goals are really linked to becoming more fluent. That’s a personal goal because I feel like my language proficiency needs to continue to grow. The supervision that I receive here from Dr. Maria Bermudez and with my colleagues, getting to speak in Spanish with them, is very helpful. One goal that I have is to be able to integrate my Spanish-speaking therapy with social justice practices. I feel that speaking Spanish is one step towards
Ashley: What I’ve learned in my social justice-focused Master’s program is that if we are talking to anyone who is not of the majority population and we are talking about depression, anxiety, or stress or anything- and at the same time we aren’t also talking about racism, sexism, classism, and ableism, and all of the “-ism’s,” - then we really missed the mark. If you haven’t included that in your therapy, we are doing really surface level work. If we aren’t having conversations about those things and asking questions about that, then we are just assuming that depression was created as a result of this person having a problem, or not doing something right, when really, it’s a result of these larger systemic things. Jason: I encourage everyone to study abroad, study abroad, study abroad! Not just 6 weeks or 2 months, not just staying with your friends who speak English, but really going into a country for a year and experiencing the culture and taking classes that are only in Spanish. Separate yourself from the English language and immerse yourself so you can create relationships and friendships in another culture. Then, I think you’ll be better prepared to serve this population. Stephanie: I think my best advice is seek out good supervision and have a community that you are practicing in because I think that’s how you can attract most people in this population. News travels through word of mouth and so in order to recruit clients and in order to be the best therapist and make sure that you are competent in the care you are giving, it is important to get good supervision from a bilingual supervisor, which is one of the reasons I came to the University of Georgia to work with Dr. Maria Bermudez!
Jason Linder (left) and Ashley Walsdorf (right) are first-year students in the FACS Marriage and Family Therapy program in the Department of Human Development and Family Science.
The ASPIRE Clinic is excited to continue offering bilingual therapy services to UGA and the greater Athens community— thank you to Ashley, Jason , and Stephanie for their insights and hard work!
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ASPIRE Clinic Happenings
New Collaboration for the ASPIRE Clinic
ASPIRE Fall Meet & Greet The ASPIRE Clinic welcomed both new and established students and faculty alike at the ASPIRE Clinic’s Fall Semester Meet & Greet. While sampling local Athens flavor at Creature Comforts Brewing Co., ASPIRE staff socialized and connected with one another. Foundational socializing and gatherings can help the student service providers at the Clinic to find additional ways of collaborating together and reaching out to one another concerning interdisciplinary work. Cheers!
The ASPIRE Clinic has continued collaboration this Fall with The Ark of Athens by helping to deliver a new pilot micro-loan program aimed at combatting the title pawn industry’s impact in the Athens community. Jessica Parks (left) and Aysha Babb (right), both UGA students in the FACS Financial Planning program, have been assisting the Ark in the launch of the program, which offers financial counseling, help with credit repair, and provides micro-loans to assist participants in refinancing out of problematic title pawns or predatory loans. So far, 6 loans have been distributed—with more to come! ASPIRE is so proud to be a part of such a wonderful program! Thanks-A-Million Celebration ASPIRE Clinic Coordinator, Megan Ford, attended the Ark’s “Thanks-AMillion” celebration to acknowledge & honor the Ark’s reaching one million dollars in emergency financial assistance to the community. As a close community collaborator, we want to say congratulations and thanks—our work together truly benefits our ASPIRE students and the people of Athens!
ASPIRE Clinic
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