Hello and welcome to the thoughtful counselor, a podcast dedicated to bringing you innovative and evidence based counseling and mental health content designed to enhance your life, whether you're a clinician, supervisor, educator, or a person wanting to learn more about the counseling process. We are here to demystify mental health through conversations with a wide range of counseling professional powerhouses. In each episode, you'll learn about current issues in the field, new science and real life lessons learned from the therapy room. Thank you for joining us on our journey through the wide world of counseling. There's a lot to explore here, so sit back, take a deep breath, and let's get started.
Welcome to the thoughtful counselor I am here today with Kirsten Murray and Anna Elliot, and we're going to dive into some really exciting work they're doing around rural counseling. Welcome Kirsten and Anna. Thanks. Nice to have you here. Yeah. So I love to just start out by hearing about your journey to where you are now you're in counseling, counselor education, what brought you here? So maybe Anna, we'll start with you and tell us a little bit about your background and how you got to where you are.
Sure. Yeah, so I am in my 10th year as a faculty member in counselor education, and I don't know if you would call it lucky or not, but I knew that I wanted to be in mental health. I wanted to be a clinician. Since I was in high school, I took a intro to psych class, and just remember, like this the second week of class, just looking around and being like, this is this is something that I can study. This is I could do this for the rest of my life. I didn't know that there was a subject in school that was available that I could be this stoked about and and, yeah, it was, it was a done deal after that. And so I studied psychology in college and worked in the mental health field, mostly with adolescents doing wilderness therapy, working in rehab centers, and also working in patient before I went back and got my master's degree in clinical mental health, and when the program was getting Ready to end, I just had this sense of panic of I love this work, and I know that this is one I what I want to do, and also I don't want the learning to end. I'm really afraid for to not have this environment and this level of stimulation around me. And so really on, on a whim, I ended up applying for a doctoral program that somebody recommended to me, and went and interviewed. And still, at that point, was was pretty ambivalent about whether academia interested me, if research interested me. I had really debilitating public speaking anxiety, so I was pretty concerned about that part of it, but I just remember being at the interview and having these really incredible conversations with the other applicants and with the doctoral students and the faculty that were there, and just thinking, I don't know exactly what I want to do with my career, but I know I want to be in this kind of environment. I want to be with people that are this excited and then this passionate about counseling and about mental health. And so then I started the doctoral program, and lo and behold, discovered that I loved teaching. I got hypnotized, so I wasn't afraid of public speaking anymore. And I also learned what qualitative research is, and fell deeply in love with that. And yeah, and so then I was at Montana State University for eight years, and then I'm in my second year at the University of Vermont. Now, I still practice as a clinical mental health counselor. I do a lot of work with couples and families, and also trained as a EMDR practitioner,
wow. And so when you say you're hypnotized and you're no longer afraid of public speaking, yes, um, yeah, that's amazing. Yes, I love that. Well, you made it sound so easy. It
was, it was, it was three sessions. I we had a colleague in the doctoral program who had been a trained hypnotist for, you know, three decades, and I was describing it to him, and he was like, I think I can fix that. And so we did some visualization sessions, and really just kind of broke me out of it. So it comes back a little bit every now and again, but it was really about learning. And. Um, to trust myself and trust my voice and that I had something to share and I didn't have to be anything other than who I was. And once, once, like,
Yeah, well, I love that. Well, I just always learning random new things here at the thought of counselor, until you're coming through a hypnotist session today. But, um, also, this is not a fashion podcast, but I just want to let people know that Anna is wearing the most incredible sweater with bunnies on it, and I kind of want to know where it came from, so we'll talk about that later. Um, Kirsten, how about you? How? What's your journey here?
Oh, gosh, a little happenstance. It turns out, I grew up in rural Idaho, and was the first person in my family to go to college. So just, I don't know, I think I've got a pluck for just staying driven and figuring things out along the way and in my undergrad, probably switched my major at least five times until I landed in psychology. And similar to what Anna was saying, I was like, Oh, I love this. I love Well, not all of it. There were some of the classes that were not so exciting, but many of the classes that were more clinically and relationally driven, I loved. And so my next step was, okay, how do I figure out the shortest, least expensive path to keep being able to do this? And I researched different graduate programs and graduate degrees and found counseling and then moved to Pocatello, Idaho, and did my master's program there in marriage and family counseling. And it was just magical to me to be able to sit in rooms and hold space for people in their relationships, and I really loved it, and just felt like I was soaking it all up. And in my last year, I started paying attention to what my professors were doing and what their lives looked like from what I could see, and I would watch them teach and think, Oh, I could do that. I could do that. And applied for the doc program there, and then did my doctoral training there. And it was one of those things, like finding counseling was like turning over a stone and finding something amazing. And in the doc program, it was like, Oh, I'm going to turn over this supervision stone and find something amazing, or research or writing, and it just kept adding these layers of things I'm really in love with. And so finished that program, took a faculty position at Indiana University of Pennsylvania, the longest University name in history, and taught there and was in a faculty position there for five years, and my family and I really started missing things about being in the West. So just started really kind of looking, staying open to opportunities. And came to the University of Montana in 2011 So, and they've been there since then. Yeah,
wow. What a what a rich history. I love hearing how I love just hearing how people came into the profession. Um, since it's not really one that you know most people think you know when they're five, like, Oh, I'd like to be a counselor educator. So it's always fun to hear how you got here. So you all are doing work on rural counseling. That's what we're here to talk about today. And I'd love to hear how you came to working with rural populations. And, you know, again, sort of that specific journey, what led you to this population specifically?
Yeah, um, yeah. So, so at the time that I started at Montana State University, Chris and I knew each other a little bit. At that point, we had gone to the same doctoral program at different times, and so had had crossed paths at conferences. And I think, you know, had a had a natural fondness for each other, one might say, but that was but we're in two different spots in Montana at the time, and so people
know that it's about four hours away, like Montana is a huge place, so living in different towns can mean big things. Big Yes, yeah,
I was in Bozeman, Kirsten was in Missoula, and so, you know, getting started as a faculty, and just as as I was getting going, looking around and getting more familiar with. The community that we were in, the specific context we were in, and what it meant to be doing counseling and to be training counselors in a rural environment, and just noticing just the distinctions and what that involves, the specificity of that, and also over time, starting to notice how when our students graduated from our programs, they tended to stay around the area that our programs were in. So Bozeman and Missoula, which are two of the biggest quote, unquote cities in the state, and so there was a saturation of mental health providers in those two areas. But then, as Kirsten said, Montana is a massive state, if you would start to go out into those more rural areas, or talk to clinicians, or talking to community members in more rural areas, and just hearing how there was almost no mental health resources there was, there was such a huge dearth. So one of our colleagues, Dr Rebecca colts and I were approached by our other team partner, Dr Jane Downey, who's an educational psychologist at the Montana State University, and she's been working in rural education, working specifically with training teachers for what person at least 2030, years. I don't want to misspeak, but she's she's got a lot of experience, and she's incredible, and she's been on the ground working with rural education for a long time, and she's an incredible human being. And so she approached Dr colts and I and let us know about this federal grant that was had just been announced that was putting funding and resources towards rural mental health, specifically in schools and and asked if we would be interested in partnering together and writing this grant. And so as we started the very, very initial planning phases of it and thinking about, how are we going to support our students in placing them in these rural communities in Montana, again, with how big the state is being like, well, the furthest out we can get them is, you know, maybe two hours from Bozeman, and that's just like a fraction that's a corner of the state. And so I knew Kirsten was in Missoula, and we knew each other a little bit. And so I called her and said, you want to jump off this cliff with me, maybe see what happens? And so Kristen, Kirsten quickly came in and became involved, and we wrote the application together. And amazingly, like, over the course of writing the application like discovered that we all really liked each other. And for me, as a junior faculty at the time, finding these three other women who were further along than their careers and were so real and authentic and grounded and passionate and brilliant was just really exciting. And then we got it. And I don't know if you've ever gotten a grant before, but there's, like, the person who writes the grant and the person who gets the grant. Those are, like, two different people, because all of a sudden you have and you're like, Oh, God, what did I say? Now I have to do it. And so that was, yeah, that was where the the real work began,
yeah. And one thing that's really, I think, kind of lovely about this. The threads of all of this is as we continued to invest in rural communities and rural mental health and invest in each other, we also became really good at being reflective about where we came from and what values we were bringing forward into these into this project, and it all of us have this heart space for rural communities. So there, we all have histories in one degree or another, in rural places, and a very deep appreciation for these places that often can get forgotten by academic structures or more populous communities. And it's just been really nice to remember that fondness and then experience it again through our students and through these partnerships. It's been really special. Yeah.
So I would I this thing I've been thinking about since I've been reading your work, is I would love to hear from you both what I think there's a lot of misconceptions about rural populations. They're certainly not a monolith. So I am curious to hear about. Just tell tell us about what rural populations look like, what what's going on for them?
Yeah, I one of our favorite things to say about doing this work. Is if you know one rural place, then you know one rural place. There are certainly some commonalities and similar challenges among them, but you have to be really careful not to overextend your ideas of what rural is into each place. And I will say that of the places we've partnered with and visited, whenever we get the opportunity to enter those communities, it feels really trying to be intentional about my words here. It feels family like. So everyone knows everyone, and everyone is sort of bonded together in one way or another. And there's a commitment in these places to kids in the school in particular, and to each other. One really simple language difference we noticed is that when we go into rural communities and we're interviewing stakeholders and talking to people to partner with, they will always describe the children in the community as our kids, our kids are this and I and they're not talking about their own children, but our kids, collectively, everyone, and I don't hear that kind of language in other places, especially more populous places, there's, There's not that kind of ownership over the relationship. And so moving into a place that may be under resourced but deeply committed to the people in that community is something that I think is really inspiring for this work.
Yeah, and this is jumping a little bit Margaret. So let me know if I should stop. But, but I think it's helpful to talk about the the model that we created, because I think that had a huge influence on how we learned how to enter into a rural community, and what we saw and what we came to understand through doing that. If that's okay, yeah, oh yeah, jump on in. And so, so, the way that we set it up, and so this was a five year grant that we did between 2019 and 2020, help me, four, yeah. And then got, got it re upped for a second five years at the beginning of 2023, in Montana. And so it's a four step training process that essentially takes 10 counseling graduate students a year, five from MSU and five from the University of Montana, and places them in rural communities across Montana, you know, again, usually within, you know, one to three hours of of where they're going to school. And so that's sort of the biggest part. That's actually step three is the internship. So that's, that's a lot of what we're preparing them for. And in order to get ready for it, we have them go through what we call a rural life orientation, which is a three day community immersion, where we go and stay in a rural community for three days and essentially walk around and talk to community members about their experience of living there, and their experience of mental health, and how that's handled, resourced, all of those different things. And so that first step of the process, I think, really set the tone for us when we first started doing this, for what we understood about what this work was really about and really centered on. And also sets the tone for the students and getting them ready for the bigger internship that is coming down the line. And so this is again, something that Dr Downey came up with, that she first did with rural educators, with rural teachers in Montana. And so we adapted it for counselors. And when we were first getting ready to do it for the first one, which was in Ennis, Montana. No, no, sorry. What am I saying, Dear lodge Montana, I remember getting ready, and it was in the middle of the semester right where all full time professors were very busy. It was February of 2020, and being like, yeah, this will be, this will be nice, you know, like, we're gonna go visit a rural community. We'll talk to some people, sure, and also, like, you know, feeling stretched and whatever, and just trying to be like, Okay, what? What is this thing? Let's, let's get into it. And then we went, and it was, continues to be the cool, one of the coolest things that I get to do as a faculty member, and it's something that I wish that we actually got to do with all of our students, because. It's this opportunity to really like enter into a space, initially as an outsider, and to come in with that open, curious, culturally humble stance and saying, Tell me about this place. Tell me about your community. Tell me about what it's like to live here. Tell me about your life, and we just ended up walking around and, you know, talking to teachers, talking to school counselors, talking to mental health professionals, but also talking to sheriffs and probation officers and coaches and the couple that owned the pizza shop that were retired teachers, and knows the name of every single kid and teacher at the school, and just really sitting in reflection with them about what their community was about, and getting to hear these beautiful stories and the ways that they take care of each other and the strengths and all of the things that make their community work, which doesn't mean that it's just this, you know, idealistic Pollyanna type of thing, like we're talking about the hard things too. But what I noticed consistently every year when we did this in a different community is that there was such a notable like mutual impact that was that was created by the conversation that we were sitting there feeling so like touched and connected, just to be hearing these hard stories and these really beautiful stories about things that the community struggled with and how they handled it. But I also watched the people that were telling the story be deeply affected by it as well, right? Like we got to, we got to witness them in this, in this beautiful role that they played in their community, which, again, didn't mean that it was glossing over the the complexities or the challenges, but just like sitting in like the richness and the realness of the experience.
Yeah, I to that point Anna, I think there's this transformation that hap continues to happen to me and I watch happen to our students, where so much of rural life is framed in a deficit orientation. I mean, even the way that we need to write these grants to show the need, we have to have somewhat of a deficit framework in order to receive the funding to support the communities, right? And so there's this shifting out of a deficit mindset and into a strength based perspective that can hold the challenges but see the strengths. And I think that prevents two things. It prevents students from entering in and looking like having a nose down to communities, or that process that can feel like pity, you know, like, oh, you pull people you put right. And the other thing that prevents is save your complexes in the students right, so that they're not going in thinking, Oh, I'm here to be here with you, and to make this all better and make it all go away. It slowly reveals a partnership and how important it is to be a listener and look at all parts of the community, and that deficit mindset begins to melt.
Yeah, so in this, I have so many questions. This is, sounds really incredible, and I think, yeah, that, I think that first thing that was coming up for me is, how do you avoid the trap of falling into, I think you said, like a savior complex, or maybe like a colonialist kind of, we are outsiders coming in. You know, how do you walk that line of, hey, we recognize this community needs support, but we don't want to come in as you know, the quote, unquote, big city folks and just do our Yeah, I guess. How do you
to you? How to have better Right? Exactly, yeah. I think a big step is we bring in cultural humility early and often into our conversations, and we as a facilitating team, work really hard to model that and call each other out gently and caringly when we're missing it, because we've all missed it at different times. So I think having that at the core of how we lead this has been really important, and it sets a tone.
And there is just something about that first step of the process, the. The rural life orientation that that really helps facilitate it in a pretty natural way. Because in addition to these conversations that we're having, and, you know, and like we usually go watch like a sporting event, we go into the school. They get a chance to meet the kids. They might, you know, sit and have a me with them, like they really spend these two full days like in the community. We also have them go walk around the community and just like, talk to different people in, you know, shops and stores, and they do a scavenger hunt and things like that. But at the end of every day, we spend a lot of time fluffing as a group and really helping them unpack what they observed, what they felt, what they noticed, how it connects to their own histories, how it connects to their you know, their their interest and whatever is going forward in their career. And like Kirsten said, like also gently calling them out when we when we hear signs of anything that feels like patronizing or assumptions or bringing in your own bias. But I think it's also just so inherently humbling to to listen to a bunch of people that have devoted their adult lives to support in their community in this way that I it, I think it just tends to to put the students back on their heels, and in a good way of being like, Oh, I'm, I'm new here, right? Like, not only am I new to this profession, but I am new in this community, and I need to listen to the experts to figure out what role I'm going to have and how I can be of service. And so we we take that experience, and then we have them take a rural counseling class, either in the summer or the fall, right before as their internship experience is starting. And so then we're cementing a lot of that learning. We're giving them readings on, you know, being aware of colonial mindsets, cultural humility, things like that. And then we're also having them do a mini version of going to their own community that they're getting placed in, and walking around, learning the history, getting the context, and starting to understand the place that they're entering into. And so I think it's just, it's really deeply embedded into how we train them, and then also, again, making sure that we're holding ourselves to that same standard.
Anna, did you talk about this? I'm just reminded of how much courage our students have to have to do this work. You know, yes, because it really is like signing up for quite a bit of the unknown. I've placed plenty of students in the same sites in Missoula over and over again, year after year, where the supervisor doesn't change, their process doesn't change, like it's just known. And there's a stability to that, and it's there's something that's just naturally comfortable about that, and when students venture into these communities, many of them new, many of them with few mental health resources, school counseling supervisors that are new, community supervisors that are brand new, and having to not only establish everything a student needs to establish, establish in an internship, but build relationships with everyone and decide how to enter a place. I it's just a big commitment from our students too. And I think when they first sign up for it, we tell them, but they don't realize it. And then they go to real life orientation, and then they realize what it means to join a community carefully and thoughtfully and with humility and and then they go and do it. I think they leave real life orientation both inspired and scared, which is kind of a nice place to be as a learner.
Yeah, absolutely, yeah. And so what are, I guess, some of the challenges, and I guess I should ask, you know, are they it primarily in school placements? Are they in communities? I guess I'm curious about what that looks like, and then what some of the challenges they face as counselors are there in those communities? Yeah,
I was realizing, as you were talking to Kirsten, that I think a piece of what helps with that, like non expert mindset, is actually that the majority of the students are placed like in directly into the school, because you're also a part of a system, right? You're not in private practice, like you're not in an agency where, just like, you know, six people come through your door and sit down like you're embedded into the into the community, in a in a different way that I, again, I think, helps them contextualize like they are a small piece of this puzzle, and also that there's a whole. System of people that have been doing this for a long time and that are really committed and really passionate and so that the school actually functions as a really important part of this process as well.
Yep, and I think to that point being placed in a school, we're placing both school counselors and clinical mental health counselors to provide services in the schools. So the students involved in the grant, it tends to be about 5050, sometimes a little more school counselors than clinical mental health counselors, and they both move into the school to be placed in different roles, right? So a clinical mental health counselor is placed in the school and they're providing mental health services to the students in a more traditional framework, and parent consultations and teacher consultations, right? And school counselors are entering the school counseling role where they're focusing on career, academics, social, emotional learning, you know, and the roles look different. And I would say that that is one of the challenges, is having the student define their role, both professionally, but also their role in the community itself. Because when you enter a community without many mental health resources, you can a be the mental health resource and be asked to do a lot of things that might be outside of what we teach you in school, your professional roles are and so helping the students navigate that and decide like how and where they want to spend their Time, to both join the community, but also hold necessary say, ethical boundaries about what their role is, and how do you navigate dual relationships? Because it's not an IF in these communities there are dual relationships everywhere. So actually being placed in a rural community takes the things that are written in textbooks and interpreted as pretty black and white and puts them in lots of shades of gray. Yeah. And so I think that's really challenging, and sometimes it can be really challenging to join a community and build trust these students, not always, sometimes they're from these communities, but are sometimes they're clocked as outsiders, really fast, you know? And it takes a it takes time, but it also takes just a lot of intentional joining for students. And so there's, there's a patience that has to happen, and then really intentional relationship building for the students internships to get off the ground. So when they come back to the university, they'll see other people whose internships are rolling and they've got a caseload already in week two, and theirs is developing slowly because they have to build trust with a whole place. I mentioned that I was from a small town, and so is my husband and his mom remarried somebody that moved to the town, and I kid you not, 15 years after they were married, I was at the local grocery store, and they're like, Oh yeah, how's Jan's new husband? 15 years everyone, right? Yeah. And it just takes time to be enveloped in these places, yeah.
So as you Oh, go ahead. Anna, go ahead. I was going to change the topic. So if you want to add to that, go for it. I was going to actually just ask. So I'm thinking about this. You know, I am in like, one of the biggest urban areas in the country, right? Like, I'm in the San Francisco Bay area, that's where my university is. And I think about just sort of our standard counselor education model, and I don't know where we cover rural counseling in our program and curriculum. I don't not in any of the classes where I that I teach. And so I'm curious where you see the gaps in our current education system, counselor education system are, and then would love to hear how you're filling that with your specific coursework and things like that.
Yeah. I mean something that has been just an interesting anecdotal experience, like I don't have the statistics on it, is that, you know, we've been submitting proposals to present on this topic since, you know, 2020 and we have gotten rejected a number of times. It's. And it's interesting going to the conferences and seeing sort of like what the big buzzwords in our field are in the moment, and how many presentations will have those buzzwords in them. And then if you search for the word rural, at least the first few years, there was nothing. And so it was like we were getting this feedback, particularly the first few years that there, there was as much disinterest as it felt like there was on a professional academic level when I went to aces most recently. I mean, I always do this, I search for the word rural. This was, this was Rocky Mountain aces. So I'll see what national is next year. I think there was four presentations that had the word rural in it. So maybe that's an indication that that there's like a slight uptick, but it does just feel like, yeah, it's not as exciting or enticing of it as a topic to some people, particularly if you don't have any connection to rural and so again, it feels like it's shifting a little bit, but that's that's been a big observation and challenges that, yeah, it hasn't felt like academia and counselor education has had a huge interest in it. And, I mean, I did the same thing with your podcast. I was like, I wonder if there's ever been anything on rural and so it's shifting, you know, but it's, yeah, it's, it's interesting, that seeming disinterest, yeah,
I think, yeah. I'm glad you said that, Anna, because and because of some of this, or because of the way a lot of things are written and not geared towards rural populations, I'm finding that we have to supplement quite a bit. And for example, in an ethics class or in an ethical scenario. I'm sure you've heard this, if you have taught ethics, oh, I'll just refer Right. Like, that's always like this real easy, squeaky clean, way out. And so sometimes, when there's responses that are textbook like and really squeaky clean, I think one of our jobs as teachers is to throw a wrench into it. And for us, what's available in rural areas as far as referrals or resources or dual relationships, it's just important that we keep adding on another layer to the learning over and over again to make it a bit more complex. Yeah,
it's also one of the reasons we ended up moving the rural counseling class from the summer to the beginning of the fall. It actually happened by accident the first time. But the space between what happened at the rural life orientation, the getting the ready, and then what, what actually it felt like to be in the school, you know, two to three days a week was big. And so, you know, we ran the class, I think, the second week of the semester one year, and the students were just like, in a state of panic, almost, you know, of just like suicide protocol, like, there's, there's no this. I was looking for this. And, you know, it's like those, those kind of squeaky, clean parameters that they had sort of picked up along the way that they thought, that they could expect were not there. But then it was beautiful, because by the end, you know, we do like a three day intensive class, by the end of the third day, like nothing had changed, other than their anxiety had gone down. They were more grounded and they were more prepared to go back into the school on Monday, and so getting the opportunity to put them in a really challenging and complex environment, but then getting to really bolster them with a lot of preparation and then a lot of continual support as they're going through it really like turns it into a transformative experience. Yes.
And continuing to ask students, what do you need, what do you need, what do you need, and then incorporating that into our monthly meetings with all of the students in this cohort has been really important, because what I've learned is what they need changes with every site placement, you know. And so for us to build our curriculum that we certainly keep some things consistent, but a lot of our curriculum gets built on feedback from them about what they need. And so there's something about our own agileness. When they say, could we spend the afternoon on this class working on suicide assessment, and saying, Yeah, okay, so we're going to shift all of us shift the second half of this class, and we're going to create modules of, how do you talk to your principal about suicide? How do you go talk to a parent about suicide? How to do a suicide assessment with the student and let them know you're bringing everybody in. So in every corner of the room, Jane was playing a principal. I was playing a parent, Anna was playing a teenager, right? It just, I think us being willing to really pivot and gear ourselves to what students are telling us this is missing, or I don't feel as confident in this, in this place, so we make sure to support them, because they don't have the same kind of support as students that have been at very well established, well funded sites,
right? Yeah, right. And we're matching. We're matching, like, what they need in that place with what we're offering in the classroom. And something that we've said to each other a number of times is, imagine if we had set up this experience where we didn't go on the real life orientation with them, or where we didn't teach the class, you know, because, like, we have been as transformed by this experience, as they have been, like, you know, like Rebecca, Jane and Kirsten, all come from rural environments. I don't you know, but we, like we all came in with our with our own experiences that had, that gave them something useful as educators. But if we had skipped the part of joining them in the community, and the experience like this would just this wouldn't have been successful, I don't think. And so I think that's another thing I see in academia that I that I really understand, is that our jobs ask a lot of us and require a lot of our time and energy, and it's really hard to make time and energy for this type of intervention and this type of educational experience, but I, but I wouldn't have it any other way, right? We every year we would experiment with where we were going to do the rural life orientation, because there's never a good time in the semester to drop everything for three days and like, go COVID community. But every time we did, we would, I would get there and just be like, Oh my God. Like, this is everything. This is why I got into this. This work is to be able to have this kind of deep, like relational and transformative experience. And so, yeah, that's, that's one thing I see is that we have these jobs that don't naturally facilitate space for us to be as creative and experiential and as immersive as I think we need to be to be really, really effective in preparing students in these ways. And that's not specific to rural, specific to any environment, you know?
Yeah, yeah. And I'm curious about what the impacts you're seeing, you know, what are the I don't know. I hate to call them results, but I guess I'm curious about what the impacts you're seeing as a result of putting these students out in the field, and how's that been going? Yeah,
I we actually were just closing out the data on our five year first five year grant, and more than half of our students were retained in rural environments one year post graduation, which I think is Really pretty good. That's huge where we started. And I there's two things that are happening for the people that aren't, because I think that's a really important thing to look at too. One is some students are realizing this is big and I'm not ready for it yet, which is also an important realization to have, because when they thought about going and doing this without as much structured support as they had in the program, some determined that they weren't ready, and that's okay. The other thing that is really in constant flux, in motion, here is schools having the funding to hire someone, and so our students would essentially provide free mental health resources for the schools for a year, and in many cases, the schools saw enormous benefit and found ways to fund people, or if it wasn't that particular student to find a way to hire someone else, and in a lot of cases, the public education system is really suffering in terms of funding In Montana, and it gets down to some of these rural schools, needing a school counselor so bad, but also needing a language teacher and needing a band director and trying to form one position that is point four, school counselor, point three, band director. Point. What would I have left? Point three,
math teacher,
right? Like you don't find that person, right? And so we uncovered more complex problems as we as we've continued to dive in,
and I think we didn't know, you know, what the level of interest or investment would be from the students. And what we saw every year was almost all of them were interested in staying where they were. It was it just came down to, typically, money and logistics, right? Of like, if their family could support them, staying in that community, if there was a position available, if there was a position available, that would allow them to have, you know, a livelihood, those were the biggest things that got in the way. It was an investment. It wasn't interest. And I think that's, that's an important thing to emphasize, is, I think there's an assumption out there that working in a rural environment might be less desirable for graduates, and that isn't what we found in our end of you know what now Kirsten 70 is, is that most of them do want to stay, and are interested in staying. It's just a matter of if they can. So, you know, that speaks to larger systemic barriers,
you know? And I was just remembering there's another small population of students, because we just have to count students that stay in Montana, rural, but we have a lot of students that apply are kind of excited to experience someone somewhere else. But we've had students accept positions in rural Maine, in rural Wyoming, and they still get to take that learning with them to
those places. Yeah, that's so cool. So I'm curious what, what are the next steps for y'all with this program, or just thinking about rural work and supporting that?
Yeah, so we've all been bitten by the bug and are crazy enough to keep committing ourselves to more and more rural work, which is exciting, and so from this grant that we've been talking about, we keep hatching other plans, be they In Montana or in Vermont. And Anna and I recently received grants to keep doing rural work, and so I'm still in Montana with Rebecca colts and Jane Downey, and we're partnering on another type of rural grant that we call prepare in place where we're really reaching out to people that are already living and have established lives in these rural communities that may be, say, eight hours away from a brick and mortar university, and training them In an online program with residential requirements and getting them prepared specifically for rural work, where they already are living. So that's our next big plan, yeah,
and I, I actually the, I think a day or two after I accepted my position to move To Vermont. You know, which I moved to be back close. I'm from Massachusetts, so I moved back family, not because I wanted to leave Montana and my amazing colleagues, but we found out we got funding for an additional five years, two years or two days after I got the position here. So that was, that was pretty heartbreaking. And leaving them was, was truly heartbreaking. Like, it it's still, it still stinks.
You're up right now.
It was really hard, you know, because again, like, on top of all of like, the benefits we got out of this experience, like getting to have, like, the the mentorship and the support and like the like, the true friendship with these three women has been one of the best parts of this experience. I just love it so much, so that was hard to walk away from. And so I did apply for another federal grant through the Department of Education, and did receive five year funding. And so I'm with a new team now, and we're creating a collaborative for rural schools between the Counseling Program and the social work program here. And Vermont has this things called called a community school model, which is like this holistic approach to bringing in the whole community and involving them in providing different resources that are not available for that community. It's actually something that was more typically done in urban communities, and there's a group of faculty here that that initiated it in Vermont in 2021 and so it's something they've been doing for the last three years. So we're collaborating closely with them. And you know, they have like, nutrition services, medication or medical services, you know, after school support, family support, and so we're providing, like the the mental health arm of that in these established districts in Vermont. So I did a pilot project with two students this year to test, run it through the Leahy Rural Institute, and we'll, we'll place our first 10 students in rural Vermont this coming fall. So yeah, that's so exciting. Yeah, the journey continues.
So it sounds like there's, you know, some federal funding out there for this, also state level funding as well. I'm curious, just as we wrap up, what is a piece of advice you would give to somebody who's thinking, hey, I think this is I'm at a great place for this kind of work where what would you what would you recommend
establish some partnerships with people that you really want to work with long term, I am going to say something Anne has already said, but what's made this work sustainable for me is having people I trust and care deeply about to do it with, and that means that we can share like that. I'm struggling right now, and I need support in this, and then we will get buoyed by our colleagues, or the shared and flexible load of implementation tends to be a really important thing in the up and down calendar work of academia. So that's really important. And also, I don't know, just partner with people that you enjoy being around, yeah, yeah, but I think it would be really hard to go after it alone.
Yeah, that's never really a good rule of life for everybody. Is just partner with people you like to be. This is good advice. Go ahead and I cut you off. No,
okay. I'm just thinking, Yeah, I mean, and then I think, you know, on, on a logistical level, again, it's, it's, I don't think it's anyone's fault. I think it's the nature of the beast, of of this job that we do is make sure that your program is connected to the community that you're you're housed within. You know, I just there's that. I mean, I think there's, there's programs all over the place that are doing an amazing job with this already, but there is that ivory tower, you know, trope and assumption that communities can have about universities and so looking around and saying, like, what, what are we doing as a program to be not just sort of like sending students out to, you know, different sites and stuff, but what are we doing to create coalitions and collaborations, where we're pooling our resources together and we're listening to each other and talking to each other, because we, I Just think you can get so much more done when when you're in collaboration, and when you're out in the community, versus in your office. So get out there, I would say, you know, and then I think even if you if you're not in a place to seek out external funding, just that place attentive pedagogy has been really transformative for me and has changed how I teach all of my classes, of really deeply contextualizing the place that students are coming from, the places the students are, where they're going, where their clients are going to be, and just really integrating that into the conceptualization and the work that they're doing.
Yeah, for sure, because I think Anna, most faculty jobs, especially tenure track jobs, faculty, end up being transplants somewhere. Yeah, almost always. And it's really good that we have this great foundation and knowledge as counselors, but when we're expected to just drop in and apply it broadly, without much knowledge of place and where our students are coming from, and where our students are going and who we're teaching to, and what are the histories of this place, and what's it like being, who are the marginalized groups in this place, and how have they been ignored? And I don't know, I think I think place gets so ignored, yeah? And yeah, to shine a light on that is really important,
yeah. I mean, and then again, I think to talk about the rural piece specifically, just be aware of those biases that people hold, you know, I think, like with how polarized and politicized our country and our world continues to be, we're we're getting worse at sort of, you know, digging down into into our. Our little corners and our little silos, and we're not having conversations with each other, we're not connecting with each other, and we're not asking questions. And so again, I think people make a lot of assumptions about what a rural community is and who somebody from a rural community is, and you're probably wrong, because we're just more interesting and complex than that, you know, and people are hurting and people are struggling and and we need to be, we need to be in relationship with each other, you know, we there's the story. I feel so bad because it's not my story, but I tell it so often about one of our students that was placed through curse inside of the program, she was a clinical mental health counselor, and part of her role was to actually offer mental health services to the staff at the school. You know, because we know that, like the staff in the school, their mental health is not is under strain as well, and there is a staff who worked there who didn't want anybody to know that he was going to see her for counseling. And so when he would go for his appointments, he would bring a tool with him so that it looked like he was just going to repair something. So he would come into session with a hammer or a step ladder or a plunger, you know, and so like think about, like that imagery of like being a man working in a school system and having mental health issues that they want to talk about, and being given this like quiet opening where, like, they have found a way to, like walk In a way, in a way that feels acceptable, that feels like, like he's allowed to do it, even if he has to hold a hammer, you know, and she got to make a difference in that person's life. And, you know, we wrote an article about the rural life experience specifically, and we did a member check with the 40 students that had gone through that experience at the time, and the number of students that wrote back and said, I'm still working with some of the the adults and some of the the families that I started with, you know, two, three years ago, these are people that that wouldn't have sought out or maybe been able to access mental health services. Otherwise, yeah, so again. Just, yeah, go ahead. No, you finish. Just again, like, looking for opportunities to create, like, even small community collaborations like this, like even if you can just do it with, like, one school, one site, one student, like the impact that that can have just through getting creative and thinking about how you can create that opening, and how you can create that connection between your program and communities that really are experiencing a lot of barriers, like, it's just, it's worth it. Yeah,
I love that. And we will link you have a couple of articles about this, so we will link those in our show notes, so those who are interested can read and learn more about it. I learned so much from reading and then from talking to you all today, so I so appreciate you taking time out of your busy schedules and looking forward to people learning more, and hopefully we'll see more rural counseling topics in podcasts and presentations and journals as we go forward. So thank you all so much.
Thank you so much. Yeah, thanks
for having us.
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