Amplify your skills!
The LCA Self-Paced equips helpers with practical skills in mental health counseling- on your own time.
This course will build on the skills you already have, deepen your understanding of mental health conditions, and give you tools to help others more effectively.
A word from our co-creator
Why lay counseling matters now.
Elizabeth Morrison shares why the world needs more skilled everyday helpers, and how this course prepares you to become one.
What is lay counseling?
Courses and certificates
What Lay Counselor Academy course is right for you?
01
The LCA: Self-Paced
Our fully asynchronous course, giving you foundational mental health counseling skills on your own schedule. The course contains essential core counseling skills that can help those with anxiety, depression, substance use struggles, and more.
02
The LCA: Live
03
The LCA: CHW Certification, with a mental health counseling emphasis.
Listen to Co-Creators Elizabeth Morrison & Alli Moreno share the story and the mission behind The Lay Counselor Academy.
Faculty
Elizabeth Morrison
Alli Moreno
Is the Lay Counselor Academy for me?
From the organizations we train
What it looks like at scale.
Over the past four years, Hill Country Community Clinic has sent more than 50 employees through the Lay Counselor Academy. By equipping our case and care managers and SUD teams with evidence-based counseling skills, we are expanding access to care in meaningful ways. Our patients don’t always have to wait weeks for an appointment with a licensed clinician. Because of the LCA course, they can receive support, encouragement, and practical tools when they need them most.
The benefits extend beyond our patients. Staff consistently report greater job satisfaction, increased confidence in their roles, and reduced feelings of burnout. Our supervisors have also noticed a difference, receiving fewer crisis calls from support staff because employees feel better equipped to respond effectively and compassionately.
For an organization like Hill Country, which strives to meet people where they are and provide whole-person care, the Lay Counselor Academy has been an invaluable investment in both our workforce and those we serve.”
The curriculum
Seven modules. Fourteen sessions. Seventy hours of practical mental health counseling skills.
Introduction to The LCA; Bias & Stigma
– What is lay counseling and why we need lay counselors now more than ever.
– How biases and judgments can damage our relationships with others, and what we can do to mitigate our own.
Core Counseling Approaches; Strengths & Values
– What we call ‘Home Stance’: the essential techniques we use over and over again: warm tone and body language, open-ended questions, empathic reflection, affirming strengths, and the practice of countering shame.
– Plus, strength-based counseling approaches.
Working with Thoughts; Helping with Depression and Anxiety
– Gain knowledge about Parts-of-Self framework and CBT.
– How to recognize anxiety and depression, and practical strategies to help others whose thoughts are causing suffering.
Happiness Practices; Staying on Fertile Ground
– Using positive psychology to help others build up their happiness practices.
– How to guide patients to a place of reflection and growth during sessions.
Helping with Addiction using Motivational Interviewing; Adverse Childhood Experiences
– A deep dive into substance use and other addictive disorders, and how to identify and counter biases we might hold.
– How to help when someone shares difficult childhood experiences, and how to protect ourselves from vicarious trauma.
Suicidal Thoughts and How to Help; Personal Identities in Counseling
– Strategies to ensure clients feel comfortable enough to sharing suicidal thoughts with us, how to respond, and how to be helpful.
– Cultural humility and helping others understand their identities.
Boundaries, Humility, Continued Learning; Ending Counseling Relationships
– Practical boundaries guidance (including when and when not to self-disclose) to ensure safety for those we are helping and ourselves.
– How we end a counseling relationship with care, ensuring those we are helping have a healthy goodbye with us.
What you actually get
Inside the Self-Paced course.
The course is yours for life, to return to again and again.
Multi-modal learning: reading, listening, watching and writing.
Learning Checks and Reflective Questions
A community of lay counselors
Lifetime access and a certificate
Read a sample article!
Advice: Why (& How) We Avoid It
By Elizabeth Morrison.
An excerpt is to the right. Drop your email and we will send the full version straight to your inbox.
Counselors practice listening to others share about deep and often painful issues, without judging, and without immediately relating (“me too”). We avoid advice or jumping in to ‘fix’. We work to maintain a ‘know-nothing’ mind, without an agenda about what the person we are helping “should” do.
From the Module 2 flipbook.
An external evaluation
The California Health Care Foundation evaluated the LCA in 2025.
In the press
What the press are saying about our work.
Asian Health Center Tries Unconventional Approach to Counseling
Amid a dire nationwide therapist shortage, could lay counselors help close the gap?
Severe shortage of mental health clinicians prompts Stanislaus County to try bold approach
2023 Steinberg Institute Champions: Elizabeth Morrison & Alli Moreno
New Workforce of Lay Counselors Strives to Bridge Mental Health Care Gaps
Take it with you
Get a copy of the LCA book.
Read more
