A reaction to EGAS: an important new approach to African American youth empowerment.

Bemak, Chung, and Siroskey-Sabdo have presented an interesting and, in many respects, groundbreaking way to approach the empowerment of African American youth. As someone who has written extensively about the academic and social empowerment of this student population, I was intrigued with these authors' Empowerment Groups for Academic Success (EGAS) approach.

Much has been written in recent years about the concept of empowerment, particularly as it relates to urban youth of color. I agree with Bemak et al.'s underlying premise that much of what is written about and practiced with respect to the empowerment of African American youth makes the assumption that counselors somehow empower young people. What is often missed in the literature and underscored by this article is the important fact that counselors do not empower the people with whom they work. Empowerment is an internal developmental process in which a person discovers how power operates in his or her life and then takes reasonable steps to seize upon personal power and channel it in constructive ways. It is important to stress that counselors merely provide the facilitative conditions that allow people to discover the internal resources to move their fives in positive directions. In other words, people empower themselves and counselors merely support the process.

It appears to me that the EGAS model could be the archetype of a true empowerment model for urban youth. The group facilitators provided a nurturing and safe place within the school so that the seven group participants could explore who they were, both individually and collectively, as young African American women. This seems to have helped them to get in touch with their internal resources, which appears to have led to important individual growth and change. The group experience described by the authors seems to represent the essence of empowerment.

However, beyond the empowerment aspect of the EGAS model is the process dimension. I have spent the past 20 years developing group counseling empowerment models for African American youth, particularly young African American males. My work has resulted in highly structured group experiences that center on an Afrocentric curricular approach to promoting academic, career, and personal/social development. Through this structure, facilitators, who are generally conceived to be African American, provide the conditions for the empowerment process to occur in youth. This approach has proven to be highly successful in helping youth to become empowered to improve aspects of their lives.

Now I must applaud Bemak et al. for providing what appears to be a viable and potentially powerful alternative to structured group approaches to youth empowerment. I am impressed with their EGAS model in this context for two important reasons. First, they have taken the race/ethnicity of the facilitators out of the counseling process. None of the facilitators of this experience were African American, yet they were able to provide the group participants with the sensitivity and support they needed to grow as young women. This underscores the important point that counselor awareness, sensitivity, and competence often are far more important than racial/ethnic similarity in counseling encounters.

Second, after years of developing and implementing structured group empowerment initiatives for African American youth, I find it interesting to see how an unstructured group experience can have such a profound effect on adolescents. This experience makes it very clear to me how powerful a group process can be. It is apparent that the facilitators had tremendous faith in the group process and allowed it to impact upon the group members and themselves.

Despite all of this, however, the EGAS initiative must be considered with some caution. While it seems to have had a profound effect on the seven participants, I would like to see more evidence that this approach truly impacts upon the academic performance of the participants. Academic achievement is the primary measure of empowerment for young people in the school setting. It is therefore important that a group experience such as this show that it has made a difference in the academic performance of the participants. In saying this I must admit that I would say this about any empowerment group for youth, be it structured or unstructured.

It also must be pointed out that this article reports on the experience of only seven young women. I would urge the authors to conduct further investigations of this approach with other groups of students. Again, I would encourage this of any group facilitators using any approach.

I applaud the authors for their courage in attempting such an unstructured group experience with adolescents. In the ongoing battle to close the achievement gap for urban youth of color, Bemak et al. have provided us with a potentially powerful intervention.

Courtland C. Lee is a professor in the Counselor Education Program, University of Maryland at College Park.