Year in Review

Celebrating Our Accomplishments

Dear ACA community, as we settle into a new year full of possibilities, we’re taking a moment to look back on our successes, from growing membership to implementing — and making progress toward — new strategic plan goals:

Advocacy & Engagement
Community & Partnerships
Education & Awareness
Research & Practical Application

2024 At A Glance

A New Strategic Plan – In 2024, ACA embarked on a new strategic plan that will guide and connect much of what we do over the next several years. The final plan is shaped by four major initiatives upon which we have and will continue to focus our time and resources building. Check out our accomplishments by clicking on the tabs above.

We Increased Our Membership — We exceeded our goal to recruit 2,500 new members and ended the year more than 60,200 members strong. This represented a 5% increase year over year.

New Staff Bring Enthusiasm, Expertise — ACA continues to build and develop our staff team. We were excited to bring on new staffers in 2024, most notably in our Publications and Membership departments, who will bring experience in pursuit of organizational excellence and superior member service.

Our Reach

60,000+ Members

230,000+ Newsletter Subscribers

350,000+ Social Media Followers

11 Million Site Visits Annually

Advocacy & Engagement

We guide counselors in advocating for the mental health and well-being of their communities and clients, as well as the profession.

Advocacy Accomplishments

Counselors became eligible as Medicare providers. Since January 2024, more than 56,000 mental health counselors and marriage and family therapists (45,793 MHCs and 10,315 MFTs) have signed on to participate.

To date, 37 states and the District of Columbia have signed onto the Counseling Compact for interstate licensure. ACA is proud to have provided both significant financial and staff support — including a historic $1.2 million investment approved by the Governing Council in 2023 — to fund the efforts of the Counseling Compact Commission. This effort continues to build momentum, and we are hopeful that more states will join this year. We anticipate that the Commission will begin to grant privileges by the end of 2025.

We took our advocacy directly to lawmakers with two in-person Hill Days in 2024. We welcomed ACA members to Washington, D.C., in May for our first Hill Day and Governing Council members to our second outing in September. ACA members participated in a combined 98 legislative visits across both advocacy days where we reinforced our 2024 legislative agenda. Plus, counselors made their voices heard in 2024:

Community & Partnerships

We nurture the counseling community and mutually beneficial partnerships to advance the profession and expand its footprint.

Community Accomplishments

Through our divisions, branches and regions, ACA is a stronger, more robust organization. Our collective knowledge and expertise make us better together.

We collaborated on events and content development, including:

A planning partnership with the Florida Counseling Association (FCA) for the 2025 Conference & Expo in Orlando. We teamed up with the FCA to better understand and plan for the support, education and professional development that Florida counselors need to face the demands of practicing in their state and discriminatory laws that target their clients, their ethics, and individual counselors themselves.
A content development collaboration with SAIGE which resulted in several ACA-endorsed statements and new articles in Counseling Today and the Counseling Corner.
Resource development with ACAC to create the School Counselor Legislative Advocacy Resource Guide.

We supported ACA components at their events, including:

American College Counseling Association
Association for Adult Development and Aging
National Career Development Association
Texas Counseling Association
Louisiana Counseling Association
Puerto Rico Counseling Association

Partnerships Accomplishments

We actively sought out opportunities to raise the profile of professional counseling and partner with like-minded organizations in discussions and initiatives focused on improving access to quality mental healthcare. This included submitting testimony for and participating in a Congressional hearing on the mental health of Black men and boys.
We launched the ACA Partner Network — a new opportunity for related organizations to engage with ACA and our members while helping to support the association’s mission.

Education & Awareness

We provide broad-reaching education for counselors across their career trajectories. ACA amplifies counseling as a viable path to wellness and delineates the counselor's identity and counseling position in the mental health field.

Education Accomplishments

We continued to build our catalog of nearly 300 online learning products, with dozens of new releases in 2024.
We welcomed more than 24,000 learners across all online learning products.
Nearly 3,000 professional counselors gathered in New Orleans for our 2024 annual conference, the premier professional development and networking event in the counseling profession.
We expanded our virtual events by: 
- Introducing the inaugural virtual Emerging Professionals Conference, in addition to the Virtual Career Fair and Professional Practice Summit.
- Producing live webinars covering pressing topics in the profession, like counselor self-care, DSM-5-TR, climate change and mental health and more.

Awareness Accomplishments

With millions of annual visitors, our website is a highly used source by people in the counseling community to access knowledge and information. We relaunched our website in March to better organize the content and improve the experience for site visitors.
For Counseling Awareness Month, we generated a large promotional cycle that spanned the ACA website, social media and in-person events at the 2024 Annual Conference & Expo.
- As a result of our efforts, we received 2,015,880 impressions and 54,987 total engagements across our social media channels during the month of April. On Friday, April 12, 2024, we also celebrated Teal Day which generated public awareness around the importance of counseling and the work counselors do.
We were included in a USA Today special section for Men’s Mental Health Month.

Research & Practical Application

We curate and disseminate rigorous, innovative research and scholarly activity to continually advance data-informed practice.

Research Accomplishments

ACA-published counseling journals had a great year, with 31% increase in published articles across the portfolio.
We redesigned the covers of ACA-published counseling journals to ensure optimal effectiveness in a digital environment and alignment with our brand.
For the first time in a decade, we commissioned a new Counseling Workforce Survey. More than 11,000 counselors shared their thoughts and concerns around pay inequalities, student loan debt, burnout, and new and emerging trends in counseling practice. Members can download the survey results on the website.
As part of our redesign of Counseling Today, we launched a new section focused on counseling research. “Research in Brief” provides a round-up of research articles across ACA and divisional counseling journals. “Research in Action” is an interview with a counseling researcher that reveals more about why the research was conducted, how the work can be applied to counseling practice and future implications. Check out the latest issue here.

Practical Application Accomplishments

The Research & Knowledge Committee is focused on a newly assigned, important project: Updating and expanding our catalog of Practice Briefs to provide more tangible insights from counseling research to be used in counseling practice.

We invite you to stay connected and take advantage of the opportunities that ACA Membership provides to share, network, volunteer and engage. And we thank you for your membership.