What’s the Word? Empowering holistic counseling (EHC)

Those of us who spend significant time working in direct support of students learn very quickly that the issue that brings someone into our spaces is rarely the only issue that matters.

For example, a student may seek support because they are experiencing difficulty in a class, but the appointment reveals that they are also juggling the need to work 30+ hours a week. Another may seek help understanding their financial aid package but is simultaneously worried about instability in their housing situation. Another student considering withdrawing from the university may be navigating a health setback, family responsibilities, questions about belonging, and uncertainty about life after Berkeley.

If we respond only to the question that brought the student through the door, we may provide technically correct information while missing the bigger picture and a more complete assessment of what they need and deserve.

This is one of the many reasons I believe strongly in the framework of Empowering Holistic Counseling, or EHC.

What do we mean by Empowering Holistic Counseling?

EHC is our effort to describe an approach to student support that is holistic, comprehensive, equity-centered, strengths-based, and action-oriented. It recognizes that effective support requires us to understand students as whole people while also emphasizing the technical expertise necessary to help them successfully navigate a complicated university. The framework intentionally brings those things together: relationship and knowledge, affirmation and navigation, empathy and problem-solving, equity and expertise.

At its core, EHC brings together things we sometimes talk about separately: relationship and knowledge, affirmation and navigation, empathy and problem-solving, equity and expertise.

Importantly, EHC is not intended to suggest that traditional academic advising is unimportant. Academic advising is essential, and the field itself has evolved significantly. Advising scholarship has long distinguished between more traditional prescriptive advising, in which information tends to flow from advisor to student, and developmental advising, which emphasizes shared responsibility, student development, decision-making, and attention to the whole student.

EHC builds on that evolution while making something especially important to our work explicit: for many of the students we serve, the way they navigate academic expectations cannot be separated from their financial circumstances, identity, family responsibilities, wellness, sense of belonging, career aspirations, or experiences within large institutional systems.

That distinction matters.

Moving “holistic” from a value to a practice

We use the word “holistic” frequently in higher education. But what does it actually ask us to do? Without greater definition, almost anything can qualify as holistic support. EHC is an effort to make the term more concrete: to move it from a value we hold to a practice we can develop.

The defined EHC Areas of Practice make that especially tangible. Holistic support means that practitioners develop proficiency in critical areas of navigational support that include providing:

• community and sense of belonging;
• emotional support and holistic well-being;
• context-specific academic guidance;
• financial aid translation and advocacy;
• graduate school, career preparation, and leadership development;
• assistance navigating challenges, extenuating circumstances, and crises.

Programs and practitioners then layer on additional forms of specialized knowledge and resources responsive to the specific communities they serve.

In practice, that can mean a single conversation requires several kinds of expertise. An EHC practitioner might need to understand how a reduced course load affects a student’s academic progress; explain a financial aid award and help a student consider the implications of loans or work-study; help someone navigate a late academic action; recognize when a conversation requires a referral to mental health or basic needs resources; help a student explore graduate school or internships; or create space for that same student to talk about whether they feel like they belong at Berkeley.

Doing those things well requires both holistic and technical expertise. That is why EHC is not simply another way of saying “care.” Care matters deeply, but doing this work well also requires knowledge, discernment, and skill.

The expertise behind the work

Doing those things well requires both holistic and technical expertise.

A practitioner must be able to listen carefully enough to understand what a student may not initially present as a question or need. It requires cultural humility and the ability to recognize the strengths and knowledge students already possess. It requires institutional knowledge: policies, systems, resources, relationships, and the judgment to know when and how to use them. And it requires the ability to bring these competencies together in ways that respond to the particular student sitting in front of us.

Research reinforces the importance of that combination. Museus and Ravello’s 2021 study of strategies that support students, especially communities of first-generation and low-income college-goers, identified three especially important characteristics: personalized support that is humanized, multifaceted, and proactive. Those findings closely reflect the premise behind EHC: relationships alone cannot resolve a complex academic or financial issue, while technical expertise without context and human connection can only take us so far. Our articulation of the EHC framework describes the unique value of the approach as precisely this combination of affirmation, navigational wisdom, practical resources, and technical expertise.

This also helps explain why one-on-one work matters so much. While courses, workshops, websites, automated systems, and group programming all have important roles, individualized conversations allow practitioners to understand how seemingly separate issues intersect in a student’s life and to tailor support accordingly. Our EHC framework identifies one-on-one appointments as the most impactful modality for delivering high-touch, personalized, holistic support.

And students recognize that value. Qualitative research with CE3 participants found that they valued support characterized not only by practical navigational, academic, and financial assistance, but also by understanding, empathy, personal connection, and the feeling that practitioners understood their experiences.

Acknowledging the expertise

There is another reason EHC is so important to me: it gives us better language for describing the skilled professionals who do this work and the expertise they contribute.

The people doing this work are not simply friendly staff who know where to refer students. They are practitioners who develop sophisticated expertise across multiple domains and then exercise judgment about how those domains intersect in the lives of individual students. They build trust, interpret complex systems, translate policy, recognize patterns, advocate, teach, counsel, connect resources, solve problems, and help students develop the knowledge and confidence to navigate the university for themselves.

This is a highly skilled, yet often misunderstood, professional craft, and one that can be difficult to see or describe from the outside.

EHC therefore helps us accomplish two things at once. It establishes a clearer standard for the robust support that is most impactful for students while also giving us a shared language for the expertise required to provide it. The more intentionally we develop proficiency across the EHC Areas of Practice, the more consistently we can provide students with comprehensive support - and the more clearly we can articulate the distinctive value our practitioners bring to Berkeley.

At Berkeley and across higher education, EHC represents a standard of practice and professional development framework that can help us more intentionally define what high-quality, comprehensive student support requires. Over time, it can also inform how we train and develop staff, design student-support positions, and encourage others to incorporate more holistic, equity-centered, and technically informed approaches into their work.

From belief to practice

Ultimately, that may be one of the most important contributions of EHC.

Defining EHC creates opportunities to train staff against clearer competencies, recognize practitioners as skilled professionals and subject-matter experts, design positions around the actual complexity of the work, and assess student support based on more than transactions or referrals. It also gives us a stronger foundation for advocating for the staffing, professional development, time, and resources necessary to provide the high-touch support we agree students deserve.

EHC allows us to stop describing holistic support simply as something we believe in and begin defining what it looks like, what it requires, and what it produces.

For students, that means support that sees the whole person without losing sight of the tangible issues they are immediately facing.

For practitioners, it means recognizing that empathy, equity, institutional knowledge, technical competence, and advocacy are not separate parts of the job. Together, they are the expertise.

What’s the Word? is a monthly column that introduces emerging language, concepts, and frameworks shaping equity and inclusion work. Each edition offers brief context, shared definitions, and practical insight to help our community build a common vocabulary and deepen understanding.