The Professional Counselor | Volume 13, Issue 4 469 In the fourth session, the group discussed the importance of humility within their community. Members discussed how it was easy to humble oneself when trying to assist a community from the outside, but that it was an important lesson that we must be humble within our own communities. Members seemed to realize that their experience of their community and identity would not be the same as the next person’s, highlighting the importance of intersectionality within the human experience. Humility was next discussed in the fifth session in terms of failure. Members acknowledged the importance of possessing humility and patience regarding our work because we will generally fail more than we will succeed in our efforts to create change. If we never failed, we would never learn from our mistakes and there would be no more SJA to do. However, knowing this instills the hope to persevere, for you never know what your planted seeds of action will grow into. Combining Themes As facilitators, we noticed a parallel between what we were experiencing and our members’ experiences. From the start of our group, we felt we needed to be more qualified to be teachers of SJA. This was our campus’s first peer-led advocacy group, which meant we did not have any models to reference, and we had to rely on our own ideas, skills, and judgment. With faculty support, we went outside the confines of our curriculum because we wanted to share and engage with this content in a meaningful way. This was a large undertaking, with little training and even less confidence. Similar to what we observed in our members, we were afraid of making mistakes in the content, direction, and discussion of this group because of the weight of the topic of social justice—especially as the first group any of us attempted to create or lead. We had to adapt to constantly developing circumstances, and this felt inappropriate for us as leaders. Something we recognized much later was that we could teach and learn simultaneously; we did not need to reach a point of expertise before developing this group. Although we do not consider ourselves experts in SJA, the work we did to prepare for each session, combined with the humility with which we presented ourselves and our work, effectively allowed us to lead the group to the best of our ability. Another source of our fear was that there was an ulterior motivation for creating this group, which was not purely social justice–oriented. We sought a sense of community, particularly given the isolating COVID-19 pandemic we were living through, and running this group gave us that community, support, and friendship. This longing for connection played into our feelings of being unqualified to do social justice work because a few of us became involved in this project out of a desire to work with friends, and not solely because we wanted to devote ourselves to social justice. However, this search for connection and participation in this SJA group gave us a passion for this work if it was not present beforehand. That feeling of connection and belonging provided us with the inner power to attempt something bigger than ourselves. The bond we authors created while facilitating this group instilled the importance of collaboration, especially when doing something new, significant, and daunting. The “S” for solidarity was also particularly salient in this case; we recognize that we could not have created or run this group alone. We needed each other to not only complete all the work required but also to hold each other accountable, support each other in times of need, and encourage each other to keep going even when our hopes dimmed. In a sense, this group and the connection to each other provided the “S” for sustainability and wellness for ourselves and our work. While reflecting on these two sources of our fear as facilitators, we discovered our desire to make this call to the counseling profession: to strengthen the bridge between academia and counseling in practice. Applying the knowledge gained from our courses to daily practice could be less intimidating and feel more like the natural progression of our nascent counseling careers. However,
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