Tu Luong Foundation

22409 16th Ave

Seattle, WA 98198

tan@tlfoundation.org

 
 

Sample Proposal for Biblical Counseling

Executive Summary

This is a request for a grant totaling $10,000 for the development of the Biblical Counseling Services (BCS) to the current counseling curriculum at XYZ Bible Institute (XYZ).  The start up cost of the project is $109,200.  There are two purposes for etablishing the BCS at XYZ.  First, BCS will provide practicum and counseling projects built upon curriculum to equip students and  other program participants to find counseling solutions that are consistent with biblical principle.  Four college credit courses such as Fundamental Christian Counseling, Biblical Psychology, Marriage and Family Dynamics, and Interpersonal Relationships will be enhanced in our current curriculum as a result of this grant funding. 

 

Second, the addition of BCS to the counseling curriculum will enable XYZ instructors to provide powerful and cost effective counseling services to our students and people in our community.  This new counseling services at XYZ will be focused on marriage and family, children of divorce, conducted-disorder children, and interpersonal relationships.  This new BCS will emphasize courses in Bible, Theology, and Counseling to provide students, teachers, counselors, ministers, and other community leaders, with a knowledge and practical application to address human concerns.  Your partnership with our counseling program will impact not only our students, but other people in our community will also benifit from this partnership. 

 

Applicant Overview

XYZ was formed in the spring of 1994, through the merger of two young and vigorously growing schools.  Founded in 1988 and 1990, respectively, Gethsemane Bible Institute and Trinity Bible Institute each sprang from a vision of an independent Pentecostal-Charismatic Bible college for XYZ City.  After making each other’s acquaintance, the two schools decided to pool their resources to this end.  In 1998, XYZ celebrated the completion of eight years of providing Christian, post-secondary professional education in northwest XYZ City, near the corner of Perry Road and FM-1960.  Plans are being made for a move to a more central location.

 

Currently, the XYZ offers the four-year degrees in Christian Ministry Major with five emphasis in Pastoral Ministry, English Bible, Biblical Psychology and Counseling, Church Music, and Christian Education.  The school  is progressing toward the goal of full accreditation, and has recently earned provisional accreditation from the International Christian Accrediting Association.  Although XYZ is a very young school, it has graduated productive Christian leaders who have impacted the lives of people locally and internationally.  XYZ students have served as pastors and missionaries in Texas, New Mexico, Central America, Europe and Africa.

 

Statement of Need

There are many needs for addition of BCS to our Counseling Department.  Firstly, with more than half of all first marriages ending in divorce, counselors are advocating a preventive approach that would encourage, if not require, engaged couples to seek premarital counseling.  For example in medicine, doctors have been advocating preventive approaches for years, and now counselors are beginning to concentrate on preventive approach for marriage and family.  The call for premarital counseling has been heard in every region of the country.  In Lanawee Country, Michigan, District Court Judge James Sheridan pulled together a committee of local civil servants and clergy who agreed that beginning June 1, 1997, couples wanting to get married in the county must attend marriage education classes.  Will this work?  Time will have the answer for this question, but right now it seems to be essential component prior to the wedding.  Your funding for this project will enhance our teaching and preparing our students marriage and family counseling and will allow us to offer counseling services to the people of our community.

 

Secondly, there is a great need for counseling services for children of divorce.  An old proverb says that, “Time heals all wounds,” but it turns out, despite the seemingly universal application of this proverb, there apparently are some wounds that time simply cannot heal.  According to Judith Wallerstein, one of the nation's foremost authorities on divorce and its effect on children, her 25 year studies indicate that the impact of divorce steadily increases--rather than decreases--over the first three decades of children's lives.  Wallerstein reports that children of divorce have a tendency to abuse drugs and alcohol, to become sexually active at a young age, to lack academic prowess, and to have difficulty forming romantic relationships later in life.

 

Finally, about one in 10 children have a conduct disorder, according to the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS).  HHS suggests that conduct disorders are often seen in conjunction with other problems including hyperactivity, anxiety, academic difficulties, or problems with peer relationships.  Children with conduct disorders often experience a lack of supervision or guidance, frequent changes in caregivers, poverty, and neglect.  They also may surround themselves with a delinquent peer group.  Because of these facts, early intervention is essential.  Counselors can help these children change the poor behavior before it solidifies and  entrenches in their lives.  

Project Goals and Objectives

Staffed by Licensed Professional Counselors, BCS will provide individual counseling, facilitates various support groups, sponsors personal growth seminars, and encourages awareness of issues of concern.  The Goals of BCS are:

1.  To teach participants to apply their learning to resolve problems related to family, self, and tension throughout the community, eventually reducing social problems. 

2.  To create a better learning environment on colleges our college campus.

3.  To establish an interdisciplinary and cross-cultural curriculum counseling training. 

4.  To promote healing and to establish counseling practices in the community. 

 

Five Objectives of BCS Are to:

1.  Add five more counseling courses to our curriculum:

a.  Fund. Christian Counseling    c.  Biblical Psychology

b.  Marriage and Family              d.  Interpersonal Relationships,

2.  Provide free 500 hours of counseling services per year to the community

3.  Provide free 500 hours of counseling services/year to students

4.       Provide four personal growth seminar sessions per year for students, local pastors, and other members of the community.

 

Program Description

For academic purposes, BCS will provide the following services to students, faculty, and staff:

1.        BCS will provides students with confidential and free counseling dealing with their own concerns.

2.        BCS will provide consulting and training to faculty and staff on how to effectively help students.

3.        BCS will provide psychoeducational programming to benefits staff, students, and local community.  Staff members are available for making presentations to classes, seminars, faculty/staff groups, and student groups on a variety of counseling-related topics.

 

For premarital counseling, traditionally many churches provide some type of counseling, usually performed by a member of the clergy.  According to Mike McManus, President of Marriage Savers, has helped Modesto, California make premarital counseling a requirement, which reports the divorce rate has fallen 40 percent since the plan took effect.  Our premarital counseling services will establish a network of Ministers to provide counseling sessions for engaged couples.  These training sessions include the preliminary examination and the teaching of conflict resolution skills.

 

Four family counseling, XYZ services will offer the biblical power to families to find and do God's will, thereby cooperating with God's plan to progressively reduce the family’s problems.  The biblical counselor will come alongside to support, to give hope, and to lead counselees to awareness to help determining the biblical principles that apply to their problems, teach them how to apply biblical principles, and assign projects that will incorporate the biblical principles so that the counselees will see change in both in mind and behavior. 

 

For children of divorse counseling, according to Wallerstein, the impact of divorce increases over time.  The research cites that the experience of divorce leaves children with a deep sense of abandonment, loneliness, and vulnerable to drugs, alcohol and sex.  Annually, more than one million children experience the divorce of their parents.  This ever-expanding population requires professional counseling to at least mitigate the repercussions of divorce.  There are some fundamental techniques that have proven to be successful, which usually involve the parents:

a.  Facilitating Communication.  Children need to understand early on that divorce is an issue between two adults, and they are not the cause of it.  Counselors can accomplish this most effectively by having the children and the parents sit down together and work through the process in a group session.

b.  Resolving Anger.  Many of the repercussions of divorce are exacerbated by feelings of anger.  Counselors can address the ill will that exists not only between the parents but also between the children and the parents.  Counselors can attempt to help parents resolve their own anger so it is not projected on children. 

c.  Group Counseling and Support Group.  According to Brenda Dew, a licensed marriage and family therapist expert, "I have found that teens work much better in a group setting than one-on-one.”  Support groups are an effective way for adult children of divorce to reconcile some of their feelings.

 

  For children with conduct disorder program, when talk about children with conduct disorder, "we're talking about unusual and serious violations of rules," said Jeff Cochran, a counseling psychologist at Georgia Southern University. 

Most childhood conduct disorders become apparent by age 10, and teachers are usually the first to express concern about the behavior as the child begins to disrupt the school environment.  Most experts do agree that successful treatment depends on early intervention.  Our program will provide training to Christian educators on how to identify and to successfully intervene early in the lives of children with conduct disorders. 

 

Method to Deliver Counseling Services

In addition to individual counseling, small group, and seminars, XYZ will use some other methods to provide effective services such as tele-counseling and internet counseling, small groups to help counselees receive the valuable professional counseling.

 

Telecounsel Offers:

Counselees can receive help immediately with real results beginning with the first call.  This telecounseling offers convenience way for counselee to receive immediate and caring support from anywhere - home, office, or even from a car - anywhere counselee can dial our toll-free number.  Counselees can call anytime and create a healing program that's just right for them.  With telecounsel, counselees always get truly affordable, yet high-quality, caring, and one-on-one counseling that yields genuine results.

 

Internet Counseling

Although the Internet will never take the place of face-to-face interactions, it can be used as preliminary sessions to identify the problems and to collect initial information about our clients.  A well-kept secret about the Internet is the low cost of communicating with people anywhere in the world.  Counselors can advise counselees from home or office, or send announcements to all members via email.  On-line "chatting," which is having a live counseling with someone by typing the dialogue, will also be used as a tool in counseling.  In addition, the wonders of the World Wide Web will be used to find or to provide counseling information.  Finally, the Internet offers counselors a vehicle to help clients who may not be able to afford individual counseling or who live in rural areas and are unable to access self-help information or organizations.

 

Student Intership Program

This is a significant period of practical work bridging the student's formal on-campus program with entry into the ongoing practice of professional counseling.  The internship site can be a Christian school, a church, or a non-profit organization.  Internship programs are customarily designed as full-time, for one calendar year, for a total of at least 2000 hours, (or two consecutive years at half-time).  The internship site is also required to furnish XYZ Program Director with a mid-year and end-of-year evaluation of the intern's performance.

 

Potential to Serve as a Model

The BCS will address the needs among immigrants, low income families, students, teachers, staff, counselors, and community leaders counseling services and training.  The lessons learned in forming this partnership and implementing a project could be enormously instructive to other schools and colleges grappling with the thorny issues of counseling education and other human services in their community.  The combination of XYZ and other non-profit organizations provides an interesting and powerful collaborative model to address community problems.  Our efforts to build new partnerships will not end with this project nor disappear quickly.  Our long-term strategy includes building upon the opportunities and lessons learned in this initiative.

 

Project Management and Evaluation

Management Team: The project will be managed primarily by XYZ staff, who will direct the training and recruiting of volunteers, students, and staff to provide counseling education and services.  Our staff will also coordinate training activities and staff development, and maintain regular communications with key project participants.  Key staff includes: John D. Haydel, President of XYZ; Kathleen Harder, Academic Dean; Carol Elden, Director of Biblical Psychology and Counseling Department; and, Jan Haydel, Professor of Counseling. 

 

Project Evaluation: The success of the BCS Project can be measured in several stages.  The first stage will be the successful establishment of an interdisciplinary curriculum.  The final stage will be the development of counseling ministries in greater XYZ City area churches and Christian Schools.

 

Intended Outcomes

Information Needed

Data Collection

Enhance  Counseling

Education.

What courses do we needed?

Number of Enrollments.

Program Activities

Information Needed

Data Collection

*Free services:

     Students

     Community Members

 

* Counseling Seminars

* Kind of services

 

 

*Subjects and Speakers

* Number of families and student we served

* Recording time

 

* Number of participants

* Number of sessions

Project Modification

Information Needed

Data Collection

Staff and participants

questionnaires

Strength, weakness,

concern, and improvement

Analysis of questionnaires

 

 

 

Budget

A.  Seed Money:                                  Requested

a.  Personnel

Program Director                                    $30,000.00        part-time (60% of the time)

Certified Counselor                                 $20,000.00        part-time (60% of the time)

Administrator Assistant                          $14,000.00        full-time

Adjunct Instructors ($35.00/hours)           $17,500.00        500 hours of instruction/training.

 

c.  Equipment

Computers and printers                          $  5,000.00        One time only

Cable, installation, and training                $  1,000.00        One time only

Desk/Chair for office                               $  2,000.00        One time only

 

d.  Supports

Prints and promotion                              $  5,000.00

Office/Counseling Facility                        $      -0- Donated space

Telephone                                              $  3,600.00

Internet Services/Web Page Hosting        $     600.00

Office supplies and copy                         $  3,000.00       

Legal & consultant services                    $  5,000.00       

Others: Administrative, etc.                     $  2,500.00       

Total/Year                                             $109,200.00