BCCI News and Updates
Certification Interview Committees
You have no doubt seen emails throughout the year to recruit volunteers to serve on certification committees for our various interview time periods. And, at times, there have been requests for certain demographics or skills which are needed. And then some volunteers are assigned, and others aren’t. We’d like to explain our goals and process in making assignments.
As you all know, one of the hallmarks of APC/BCCI and its certified chaplains is diversity, equity, and equality and the chaplain’s ability to work with care recipients of all spiritual/faith groups and those who claim “none”. It is upon this foundation which we build our committees to the best of our ability. To this end, we check and double check for diversity in gender, spiritual/faith group, race and ethnicity, and region of the US. Then we check to ensure we have presenters, we have experienced committee members with newly certified or first-time volunteers, and volunteers who served last round vs. those who haven’t served yet this year. And for 120 candidates, we assign 240 volunteers! (Each volunteer serves one day for two interviews.) As you can see, it is quite a time-consuming puzzle and at times we don’t get it 100%, but we try!
All that to say, we need a large pool to draw from and then at times need to say we filled all the spots and hope you will volunteer again next time. It’s not personal – we love our volunteers! But we can only do our best to manage all the pieces and to be as diverse and equitable as possible to our candidates and to our committees.
If you have questions or thoughts to share, please don’t hesitate to reach out to Carol Pape (carol@professionalchaplains.org).
