Good morning, readers.
Amid the uncertainty, a spot of good news: the local nonprofit El Futuro, which provides bilingual mental health services to Latino communities, has announced plans to expand its groundbreaking “Mentes Fuertes” initiative in the wake of receiving a $464,000 grant from the managed care organization Alliance Health.
Mentes Fuertes launched earlier this year. Modeled after the promotoras movement in Latin American countries, the initiative deploys people who are already trusted and ingrained within communities to serve as mental health workers for their friends and neighbors.
“After three months of training, somebody who has trust, or confianza—somebody who has street cred in the community—they can go out and provide ten sessions of very foundational mental health support for individuals who are struggling,” says Luke Smith, El Futuro’s founder and executive director.
Smith, a psychiatrist, says the results from the program’s first half-year suggest that nontraditional treatment interventions—strengthening cultural pride, for instance—are just as essential as traditional treatments like psychiatry or therapy.
“Oftentimes, in the academic worlds that we’ve created, we don’t think holistically,” Smith says. “Watching [the community mental health workers’] intuition to really be community-driven and anchor themselves in community feedback is something that we’re all learning from.”
Mentes Fuertes currently employs four part-time community mental health workers. The first priority for the grant money, Smith says, is to bring them on full-time.
Have a good Wednesday and Fourth of July. We’ll be back in your inboxes on Friday.
—Lena
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Today’s weather
Sunny with a high of 98 degrees.
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