Advocate Spotlight: Melanie M. Wilcox, PhD, ABPP

I am most passionate about higher education policy, both in terms of supporting students and workforce issues. Graduate-level public service careers, including psychology, are absolutely necessary to the functioning of society; but increasingly, costs of living and costs of education make it difficult, if not impossible, for people to pursue and complete graduate education.

Students (or prospective students) of color, lower socioeconomic status students, and first-generation students are the most likely to encounter significant economic barriers. Costs of living have skyrocketed against stagnant wages for 40+ years, and public funding of higher education has continuously shrunk in that same time period.

The net result is a system that no longer supports the recruitment and development of a strong and diverse professional workforce—exacerbating our shortages of psychologists, psychotherapists, medical professionals, and other public service professionals vital to our society.

Advocacy is prevention work. Many of the issues we seek to address in psychology, whether in the therapy room, in the classroom, or through research, are downstream problems that result from upstream (e.g., public or institutional policy) issues. APA's annual Stress in America surveys make clear the impacts of society-wide stressors.

Psychology has an important role to play in policy advocacy, not in lieu of or downstream work but precisely because of our expertise in understanding and addressing downstream, individual- and community-level issues.

Issues of inequity are central to my advocacy work. For example, student loan forgiveness is an equity issue because students of color, lower SES students, and first-gen students borrow more to finance their education (including within graduate psychology education specifically) than their more privileged peers do. Advocating for greater funding for the APA Minority Fellowship Program aims to offset this risk of greater borrowing with tangible financial support.

As APA's policy statements make clear, addressing racism and other forms of oppression at the systemic and structural levels is crucial—and that is my primary emphasis in policy advocacy.

As cliché as it sounds, we are stronger together—and I think it is incumbent upon us to collaborate with our colleagues across specialties as well as interdisciplinary colleagues. A core principle of Structural Competence is structural humility: That one's specialty or discipline does not have all the answers.

My advocacy work has allowed me to work closely with colleagues in clinical psychology, school psychology, law psychology, social psychology, developmental psychology, and more, and I am routinely drawing on the expertise of colleagues in higher education administration, medicine, law, public health, and sociology as well as other fields. Each specialty and discipline brings an important piece of the puzzle, and we often need those pieces to better understand the whole picture.