�ֲ���ý

By Melanie Padgett Powers

July 2026

Victoria Kress, PhD, LPCC-S, NCC, was a curious kid. She was always carrying a book around and loved to learn. As she got older, her inquisitiveness zeroed in on human behavior and why people do the things they do — but also zoomed out to wondering why societies and cultures operate in certain ways.

To focus on all these questions, she double-majored in psychology and sociology at Baldwin Wallace University in Berea, Ohio, as a first-generation college student. But she didn’t know she wanted to be a counselor. Not yet.

It wasn’t until her last college class for her psychology degree that her future career began to take shape. For her internship field-placement class, she volunteered in a domestic violence shelter. As she was talking through the experience with her professor — also a counselor, unbeknownst to her — he said, “You should really look at a counseling degree.” Kress thought, “What’s counseling?”

“It really was a moment that changed my life,” she says. “I immediately applied to a counseling program, got a graduate assistantship tutoring statistics, and was hooked.”

Today, Kress is director of the Clinical Mental Health and Addictions Counseling Programs at Youngstown State University in Ohio. She has been a counselor for 31 years and a counselor educator for 26. On July 1, she became the 75th president of ACA.

Taking a Rewarding Detour

As Kress pursued her master’s in community counseling and later her PhD in counselor education and supervision/clinical mental health counseling at the University of Akron, her passion began to take shape. She found herself drawn to advocating for youth who had endured adversity, guided by a growing sense that their stories were often misunderstood.

“The concept of ‘trauma-informed care’ had not been developed yet, and I knew I wanted to be a part of creating those conversations,” she says. “I was less interested in talking about what was wrong with people and more interested in talking about what happened to them and how the way they coped made sense in context.”

As she began to investigate trauma counseling further as a new counselor, her career took an unexpected — but valuable and rewarding — detour.

“I quickly realized that I couldn’t do what I wanted to do effectively because, as a profession, we didn’t have the footing yet that we needed,” she explains. “We were, historically, one of the newer helping professions to the table. When I first became a counselor, we could only be reimbursed by about 20% to 30% of insurance panels. So we weren’t being recognized. We couldn’t practice our craft and do what we were being trained to do.”

Always drawn to the underdog, Kress began to see the counseling profession itself in a similar light. At the time, the field was still finding its voice and footing, and she felt compelled to help it grow and thrive.

“I realized that we needed to advocate for our profession so we could have the reputability required to be taken seriously to advocate for the populations we care about.”

So she turned her attention to professional and legislative advocacy, becoming involved first in the Ohio Counseling Association (OCA), then ACA.

“I’ve dedicated the bulk of my career to working with others to elevate counselors so that we could be on an even playing field with other mental health professions,” she says.

In 1998, early in her career, Kress gave her first presentation on advocacy at an OCA conference. “I didn’t know what I was doing or talking about, but I knew I cared an awful lot about growing our profession.”

Over time, Kress’ skills and experience grew to match her passion, leading her to advocate for counseling recognition and professional rights at both the state and federal levels. She was president of OCA from 2014 to 2015 and spent six years on Ohio’s counseling licensure board, where she helped shape the state’s current practice act.

Kress was also the �ֲ���ýMidwest Region chair and was on ACA’s Governing Council. She has chaired or served on over 100 counseling-related committees, and, in addition to OCA, she has been president of Chi Sigma Iota International, the Association for Humanistic Counseling and the North Central Association for Counselor Education and Supervision.

Kress is proud to have played a role in advancing the counseling profession. Today, counselors are recognized across the healthcare landscape and are reimbursed by a range of third-party payers, including private insurance plans, managed care organizations, Medicaid and Medicare. The Counseling Compact is also rolling out nationwide, expanding access and professional mobility.

“I think we’re finally at a place where we’re settled and we’re really recognized, and that’s super exciting — although there are threats out there always looming that we need to be aware of.”

�ֲ���ýhappens to be the third organization Kress has been president of that is simultaneously going through a CEO transition. Brian D. Banks, previously ACA’s chief government affairs and public policy officer, returned to lead �ֲ���ýthis spring, and Kress looks forward to working with him.

“I really love transition, and I do well in it,” she says. She gets energized by building systems and programs and the visioning that comes with them.

“It feels like the right time for me to step into the role of �ֲ���ýpresident in that way. I love this profession so much, and I’ve dedicated my life to it. This feels like a natural next step — having a voice, helping elevate who we are and what we do, and thinking about where we’re going.”

Championing Youth

As a counselor educator and �ֲ���ýpresident, Kress is now returning to the work that first drew her to the profession — advocating for youth — while continuing to champion the field itself. “As I start to think about the second chapter of my career, I’m really excited about getting back to why I went into this profession, which is to do child advocacy work and trauma-informed work,” she says.

As �ֲ���ýpresident, she aims to call attention to childism, which she defines as the systemic devaluing of children and young people through attitudes, policies and practices. She points out that counseling — and our entire society — is constructed and led from an adult-centric viewpoint.

“There is no population across cultures with fewer rights than children,” Kress says. “They have very limited legal protections, and their voices are often not heard.”

Kress notes that society, including the helping professions, often views youth through a lens of control. Children and adolescents are frequently brought to counseling not because their perspectives are being sought, but because parents, schools or the courts perceive them as “misbehaving” and in need of correction.

“There are ways we unknowingly reinforce those dynamics that can feel patronizing,” she says.

A more effective approach, she believes, is to elevate the voices of young people, bringing them more fully into the counseling process, recognizing the limits of their rights and working collaboratively with both children and their caregivers. In doing so, counselors can better support not only individual youth, but the families and communities around them.

“I really want us to play with some of these ideas to figure out how we can be leaders in our communities, even amongst all the helping professions, and really giving voice to youth,” she says. “As counselors, we have a developmental focus that’s inherent to our identity and who we are. We’re always thinking about people’s developmental levels and what that means in terms of how they experience the world and how we can help them.” 

Kress carried these values into her own parenting. Rather than relying on traditional discipline, she centered her household around collaboration, voice and emotional attunement. “I’m really proud I’ve raised my children this way,” she says. “My kids are absolutely beautiful, healthy, connected, lovely human beings.” Her daughter, now 23, is a trauma nurse who plans to become a certified registered nurse anesthetist. Her 21-year-old son works in computer science.

Fighting for the Profession

While counseling has come a long way, legislative advocacy will always be critical — perhaps even more so in chaotic and uncertain times. Such advocacy will be another focus during Kress’ presidency. She wants to create programs that will help counselors develop sustainable legislative advocacy skills.

“As counselors, I find we have heart and we have passion. We have an advocacy spirit, but where we struggle is having the skills to know how to be effective legislative advocates.”

As she reflects on where she is today, Kress cherishes both the role she has played in advancing the profession and the privilege of working alongside her clients. “It’s powerful to watch people connect the dots — to see that they’ve been doing the best they can, that they have strengths and resilience they hadn’t fully recognized, and that their reactions are often normal responses to abnormal situations. It’s a privilege to be with them in that process and to help create something new.”

The counseling philosophy, she explains, is focused on understanding people’s developmental and contextual experiences and their strengths and how all of that affects their mental health. That differs from a medical model of psychopathology that focuses on “what’s wrong with you?”

“It’s very unique to counseling,” Kress says. “I’m so proud to be a counselor. I’m so glad that I found myself in this profession.”