In this webinar, Salud Hero Kymberly Lacrosse who works with Latino youth to help bring healthy changes to their community shared her personal story as well as experiences working with Jóvenes SANOS. If you missed the webinar be sure to see check it out here. Every child, teen, or young adult, needs someone they can count on to guide them in the right direction. For many, mentorship and opportunities for leadership can go a long way, even changing one's life course trajectory. Despite the great importance of these opportunities many Latino youth lack mentorship and report a feeling of "disconnectedness." Nearly 15% of Latino youth are reported to be disconnected from opportunities, leading to less education, unemployment, and increased rates of childhood poverty, ...
Local leaders can get $1.4 million to help their community prepare for, withstand, and recover from disasters, thanks to a new two-year grant opportunity from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF). The new grant aims to help community leaders and researchers create "resilient communities." Resilient communities can anticipate and adapt to unexpected challenges, like the recent devastating hurricanes in Texas and Puerto Rico. Disasters cause damage from infrastructure to the local economy. They also impact institutionalized discrimination, access to healthcare, and mental health issues and stress. For example, Texas leaders formed a task force to respond to mental health issues in schools impacted by Hurricane Harvey. How prepared is your community for an ...
Minorities don't trust police. Police don't trust minorities. You can see this dynamic in any viral video of police-associated violence across the nation. What is harder to see is how this "fraught relationship" impacts the mental, emotional, and behavioral health of both police officers and minorities like Latinos, according to a trustnottrauma.org report. That's why a new program is taking a new approach—trauma training—to rebuild police-community trust and relationships in Newark, N.J.
Why Newark?
Communities rely on police departments to "protect and serve." The police, in turn, rely on community support and cooperation. But this model doesn't always work in harmony, according to RAND. Newark (34% Latino) is a prime example. In 2011, New Jersey's American Civil ...
Do you get enough sleep? If not, your lack of shut-eye could be harming your health. In fact, for Latinos, lack of sleep contributes to heart attacks, obesity, and other big health issues. That’s where the “Los trastornos del sueño y la promoción del sueño saludable” (the sleep disorders and the promotion of a healthy sleep) program comes in. Los trastornos del sueño trains community health workers, called promotores, to teach people about the importance of sleep. The program's 600 promotores—300 in the U.S. and 300 in Mexico—teams up with nurses and clinicians to deliver bilingual and culturally relevant education to improve sleep habits. This helps reduce health care needs for sleep apnea, insomnia, and restless legs syndrome. Now they've won an ...
Update on April 25, 2018: A federal judge orders the U.S. government to continue Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) and accept new applicants, according to the Washington Post. Immigration is a politically divisive issue. It can be hard to keep in mind that real people are affected, no matter what your political views. People's livelihoods began to hang in the balance in September 2017 when U.S. Attorney General Jeff Sessions announced that the Trump administration would be rescinding the DACA. DACA is an Obama administration program begun in 2012 that allows undocumented immigrants who were brought to the United States as children to apply to defer deportation and legally reside in the country for two years. They can apply for reinstatement after. How many ...
The White House has proposed changing immigration policy to allow citizenship for up to 1.8 million young people brought into the U.S. as children—in addition to a $25 billion border wall and other security measures, USA Today reports. The proposed bill would blaze a path to citizenship for DREAMers, undocument immigrants who came to the U.S. as children. DREAMers have been in limbo since the Trump Administration rescinded the Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA) program, which was created by the Obama Administration to allow undocumented children brought to the U.S. to remain here. The bill, which will be introduced to the House and Senate in the coming weeks, would for the first time provide a clear path to citizenship for 1.8 million undocumented immigrants that ...
"I hear demons telling me to be bad." "I need my medicine to calm down." "Mom has a new boyfriend, but that’s okay cause dad has a new girlfriend." Fred Cardenas has heard these statements from kids ages 6 and younger who suffer mental health issues. Cardenas, who has spent 30 years in early childhood services in San Antonio (68% Latino), said overwhelmed parents and stressed teachers struggle to deal with these kids. Health workers too often look for a psychiatric diagnosis to medicate. He wanted to help parents, teachers, and health workers look more at the context and relationships experienced by the kids. So Cardenas helped build a program—Early Childhood Well Being (ECWB) at Family Service Association of San Antonio. ECWB intervenes early for kids ages 0-8 ...
New Year’s resolutions are a tradition that many people engage in every year. Some resolve to address physical health – to eat better, to lose some weight, to exercise more – and these are all great. However, one aspect of health often gets completely overlooked during this time of year. Mental health affects millions of people across the country, but more often than not goes unaddressed. Latinos – especially young Latinos – are statistically more likely to have mental health issues than their peers and they are far less likely to seek treatment. Lack of access to resources, cultural stigma, and language barriers are all key reasons why Latino mental health often goes untreated. In an effort to reverse this situation, Kaiser Permanente has launched a website entitled ...
Liz Franklin made an important discovery about mental healthcare for the Latino population in her years as school therapist at Washburn Center for Children in Hennepin County (6.9% Latino), Minn. Speaking Spanish is good—but it's not enough to understand Latinos' thoughts and situations. "You won’t get everything right if you just translate things literally," Franklin told the MinnPost. "You have to understand the deeper meanings, and to do that takes time and a lot of communication." That's why Franklin decided to help. She created a consortium of more than 80 Spanish-speaking therapists, doctors, and other mental healthcare providers to share more about the Latino culture and the issues that this population faces.
Latinos and Mental Health
Latinos are less likely ...