Lay Community Counsellor - Lay Community Counselors

Lay Community Counselors

Lay counselors are members of the community who are trained to provide a specific service or to perform certain limited activities. The concept of lay/community counselors is not new.

A large number of agencies outside of India, particularly in the United States and United Kingdom depend on the volunteer sector for counseling services (Bond, 1993). Therefore the strategy adopted by ADEPT was of community based counseling using volunteer lay community counselors who share a significant aspect of their background – culture, language and experience primarily - with the affected community .

Members from the affected communities, and others closely interacting with the local population such as teachers, government personnel etc., can be highly effective to reach out as community counselors as they represent the groups they are serving, and can readily gain access to them. This model works by strengthening the existing social support networks.

Lay counselors have been used in counseling of drug addicts, people living with or at risk for HIV/AIDS etc. Experiences have showed that paraprofessional counselors, who would work effectively in their home-community, can be produced with short-term training. Gluckstern (1972) reported success of a 60 hour training of parents as lay counselors. The study evaluated the effect of the program on the trainees with regard to knowledge and attitudes, the effect of the training upon the trainees with regard to counseling skills acquisition, and the role the trainees played in the community seven months after training. The results of the study indicated that the trainees did in fact learn the skills taught and did maintain them over a period of time. Peer counselors have been found to be more effective than regular professional care (Malchodi et al., 2003)

Lay community counselors overcome the issues of entry into community, those related to ethnocentrism, and the shortage of resources, by training members from within the affected community. These same counselors are especially effective as they are involved in the relief and recovery operations after the disaster.