Allison Ponce, PhD, associate professor of psychiatry, and colleague Ayşe Çiftçi, PhD, professor of counseling psychology at Purdue University, led the creation of the Council of Chairs of Training Councils’ 2020 Social Responsiveness in Health Service Psychology Education and Training Toolkit.
Over 150 psychologist-leaders co-constructed this resource to support psychology educators. As the CCTC 2020 Consensus Statement notes, “Attendees identified ways training programs can act on long-standing concerns about health-related inequities, social injustice, systemic racism, and the role of unrecognized privilege. The goal was to shift norms, structures, and practices in HSP education and training to ensure that training faculty/supervisors are competent to prepare the next generation of psychologists to be socially responsive.”
According to its website, the mission of CCTC is to provide a forum for communication among doctoral, internship, and postdoctoral training associations in psychology. CCTC promotes discussion of professional education of psychologists, develops recommendations to be reviewed and possibly implemented by member organizations, encourages communication between CCTC members and associated organizations and provides comment to the American Psychological Association (APA) Board of Education Affairs, the APA Committee on Accreditation, and other APA Boards and Committees on relevant issues.
Ponce is Director of Education at the Connecticut Mental Health Center. She is chair of the American Psychological Association’s APA Policy and Planning Board. She is past-chair of the Board of Directors of the Association of Psychology Postdoctoral and Internship Centers (APPIC) and serves as an internship site visit chair for the APA’s Commission on Accreditation.