Counselors working with black ghetto populations must consider the geography, moral values, and commonality of interests of the community. The counselor is primarily concerned with the deployment of community resources and, when resources are scarce, the counselor must become an advocate. Counselors striving to change the blacks' perceptions of institutional services as inaccessible must determine what conditions impede service delivery and what institutional elements are perceived by blacks as threatening. In terms of their social order, black ghettos are moral communities. Counselors must discern the moral order of the ghetto and its supportive values and institutions, and must appreciate the significance of those factors to ghetto residents. Rejected by the larger society, lower-class blacks construct an identity and obtain status and self-esteem within their own ghetto communities. Counselors must understand this notion and recognize the forces which operate to discourage work and encourage welfare among the black lower class. If counselors are to effectively attack social problems, they must view the black poor not in psychiatric terms, but in terms of the social and structural constraints which are the true locus of their failure. (NRB)