Bringing Hope

Alums of the Master of Science in Counseling have for years been working in schools and clinics nationwide, helping to improve lives and change communities. Now, with The launch of the new MBU Counseling Center located in an inner city charter school, the still young program has taken an unprecedented leap toward the fusion of theory and practicality - providing a real-life laboratory for students while also acting as an agent of change for a community at a crossroad. Simply put, the free urban counseling clinic - one of the first of its kind in the country - typifies an academic program that couples compassion with innovation in an effort to change the world.

Sipping on a cup of hot tea, Jill Powell anxiously sat inside the new MBU Counseling Center at the Imagine School of Environmental Science and Math (ESM) one evening this winter. Powell, a graduate student in MBU's Master of Arts in Counseling program, was-to say the least-eagerly waiting to meet her very first client, a student of the inner St. Louis city charter school where years of academic practice would soon collide with a very real-life test.

The counseling session that cold winter evening inside the old brick Kroger's Bakery turned state-of-the-art kindergarten through eighth grade school not only fulfilled a bold, career-altering dream for the 50- year-old Brentwood, Mo., resident, but it also acted as a major milestone for the University's rapidly growing graduate program in counseling.

A handful of impassioned MBU faculty members have devoted much of their professional lives in recent years to a shared dream of establishing a real-life laboratory for their students. The hope was that the laboratory would, just as important as its service to the students, provide a long-term, substantive service to a community in need. The MBU Counseling Center, a firstof- its-kind collaboration between a charter school and an institution of higher learning, is serving that purpose and so much more.

"The Center allows our students to tackle socially relevant situations under the supervision of skilled clinicians so that they are better prepared to confront similar circumstances after graduation," said Dr. Skully Stikes, clinical director of the Center and professor of counseling and psychology. "At the same time, it helps to resolve personal and social issues associated with this city."

In many ways, the MBU Counseling Center, which is free to all clients, is tangible evidence of an academic program distinguished by an increasingly well-known characteristic of intertwining research, theory, theology and, last but not least, practical experience. The objective is to ensure students of the program are primed to make a profound impact in an industry aimed at changing lives upon graduation.