During the sixth annual Community Engagement Awards hosted by the Center for Community Service Initiatives (CCSI). Dr. Lauren Shure, an associate professor of counseling in the School of Education received the Community Engagement Educator Award. Dr. Shure assisted Pridelines with accessing much-needed mental-health counseling service for Miami-Dade’s LGBTQ youth. She also supported a social/emotional learning and empowerment program for trauma-sensitive youth in a Miami-area school. Pridelines is a local LGBTQ Center that expressed a need for culturally competent, low-cost counseling services for their youth, and many of whom have experienced trauma. Dr. Shure saw this as a wonderful opportunity to train her counseling students in providing LGBTQ-affirmative, competent counseling, while addressing a community need. Clients from Pridelines began showing up at Barry’s on-campus training clinic, the CARE Center, and Dr. Shure students began training and serving clients who may otherwise be underserved or not served at all.
The success of this collaboration made Dr. Shure think about how she would love to get her students out of the classroom and into the community. She began working with Pridelines to prepare them to become a practicum and internship site for Barry students, and began utilizing CSL 588: Crisis Intervention, a core course in the MS in Counseling program, to introduce them to Pridelines and begin training them to work confidently and competently with LGBTQ clients. In Dr. Shure’s CSL 588 course, her students get trained in LGBTQ-affirmative counseling basics and prepare most of the semester to design, deliver, and evaluate a youth resilience/suicide prevention workshop at Pridelines with their youth. Dr. Shure has been inspired and energized by the presentations her students have created and delivered with Prideline’s youth. She has seen this project open her student’s minds and stretch their knowledge and skills to work with a population with whom they may never have thought about working before. She sees how the connections made between her students and the youth are mutually enriching and beneficial. Both the students at Barry and the youth at Pridelines truly are teacher-students and student-teachers. This two-way sharing of knowledge and experience as a teaching tool is a main tenet of Dr. Shure’s teaching philosophy.