Reciprocity as a Community-Engaged Process: What I Learned Through My Clinical Work

When I first attended a graduate community of practice meeting, I came into the room expecting collaborative frameworks discussed through robust participation, but instead, I found something quieter: a small group with abstract conversations about principles that felt distant from me and my work. For the second meeting, I caught myself wondering if I was in the right place at all.

However, something as fleeting as language has a way of arriving when you need it most and in the most unexpected way.

My clinical practicum work centers on supporting families from marginalized communities who have been subject to health systems that make it difficult for individuals navigating language barriers, cultural inconsistencies, and economic precarity.

Before I was able to connect my clinical work to community-engaged practices, everything seemed straightforward. I began working with an individual who needed interpretation services, and as we worked, something became extraordinarily clear. Interpretation was time-consuming and created a dynamic where information primarily passed through me rather than emerging from the client’s own sense of meaning-making. So together, we decided to restructure, recognizing that longer sessions built to account for the time interpretation needed were necessary. I didn’t want to impose this, so I asked, and I listened to what made sense for my client.

This seemed like a small decision, but through reflection, I realized that I was applying what I learned through the community of practice: the idea of reciprocity. I realized it went beyond an abstract ideal and that, to me, it meant recognizing how the traditional therapeutic frame of the 50-minute hour was itself a calculated choice and not simply an inevitability. Reciprocity meant a willingness to reshape that traditional frame to serve the people we are meant to serve.

What seemed like the community of practice’s limitation, abstract discussions, became what I value most about our meetings. I realized that I needed to organize these abstract ideas into my own grounded work, and this emerged as noticing reciprocity as a foundational ethical stance: that communities must define not just what we study or who we serve, but how we do this.

As I look forward to MHPSS advocacy work in India, I realize that my job would not be something I do for communities, but rather with them. The graduate community of practice has taught me that a reciprocal orientation means a willingness to question institutional norms, to listen to what people actually need, and to be transformed by that listening.

The CoP has given me language for what my clinical work was already teaching me: that real ethical practice can only begin when we stop assuming we know what serves people best and instead ask.