606 The Professional Counselor | Volume 10, Issue 4 Individual Fellowship Plan. NBCC MFP staff work with each individual fellow to craft an Individual Fellowship Plan (IFP) in which educational and impact goals for the fellow’s targeted underserved community are created with the goal of completion during the fellowship year (NBCCF, 2019). Goals must have a stated benefit for or impact on the underserved or marginalized community with whom the MFP fellow is working and must also demonstrate an educational impact for the MFP fellow. Progress toward IFP goals are tracked by MFP staff and in collaboration with assigned mentors throughout the fellowship year in order to provide the necessary resources and support (NBCCF, 2019). Mentors. MFP fellows are paired with volunteer mentors, many of whom are MFP alumni themselves and/or serve as counselor educators and practicing counselors (NBCCF, 2019). Mentorship occurs throughout the fellowship year in an effort to provide support and guidance for fellows as they navigate completion of their IFP, journey through the CES doctoral program, and consider professional careers (NBCCF, 2019). Mentors and mentees determine mutually agreed-upon goals, meeting times, and frequency, and establish the boundaries of the relationship for the fellowship. Webinars and Trainings. All MFP fellows attend a minimum of six live or recorded webinars offered by NBCCF in their webinar series Innovations in Counseling: Working with Minority Populations and Building Professional Excellence (NBCCF, 2019). Training opportunities, such as attendance at the ACA or Association for Counselor Education and Supervision national or regional conferences promote fellows’ educational and professional IFP goals. The fellowship year culminates in the annual Bridging the Gap Symposium on Eliminating Mental Health Disparities where “counselors, counselor educators, and counselors-in-training come together from around the country to focus on the provision of mental health care for underserved minority, military, rural, and marginalized groups” (NBCCF, 2019, p. 58). NBCC has awarded MFP fellowships to seven doctoral cohorts since 2013. Many MFP fellows have graduated from their doctoral programs and entered the counseling profession as advanced practitioners, supervisors, and counselor educators. However, a comprehensive description of outcome information from all the cohorts has not been undertaken. Therefore, we aimed to collate MFP data gleaned from awardee demographic information and annual surveys completed by the fellowship cohort members. Method In order to access the NBCC MFP cohort data for our analysis, we sought permission from the NBCC MFP administrators. Because our analysis utilized previously collected data by the NBCC MFP administrators and would not divulge protected health information, the project was deemed to be “not human research” by the first author’s institutional office of the IRB. Therefore, IRB approval was not warranted. We aimed to collate the descriptive statistics gleaned from demographic data captured from applications of those doctoral students awarded the fellowship. We also culled qualitative responses from surveys distributed to NBCC MFP doctoral fellows during their fellowship year and 1 year after fellowship completion. The survey created by members of the NBCCF staff overseeing the MFP was developed to meet SAMHSA’s reporting criteria for MFP grant recipients. The survey consisted of 39 questions and included nine open-ended questions, allowing for short answers from the survey recipients. We aimed to analyze responses to only one of the survey questions—“In what ways has this scholarship or fellowship been meaningful to you?”—as we believed responses would offer a broad range of fellow experiences. In total, surveys were distributed to 158 active and alumni fellows.
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