Supporting mental health for Hispanic/Latino communities through community health workers

The California CEAL Team, also known as the California CEAL Alliance (CA CEAL), elevates community health workers and the power of academic-community partnerships through its workshop series. Motivated by feedback from community health workers/promotores (CHW/Ps), CA CEAL formed a community advisory board of community organizations and CHW/Ps to guide its activities. Initially, the workshops focused on training in Spanish regarding vaccine reluctance to help CHW/Ps during the COVID-19 pandemic. Later, the workshops expanded based on feedback from the community advisory board. Although the workshops started at Stanford University, this local CEAL team was later joined by others in the CA CEAL Alliance, including the University of California (UC) Davis, UC Merced, University of Southern California, and UC Irvine Office of Civic Engagement.

Mental health was chosen as an important topic to address in the workshop series, particularly for the Hispanic/Latino community. The training included educational sessions and giving CHW/Ps the tools to support their community. One promotora noted the value of the resources not only for their communities, but also for CHW/Ps, stating, “If we are not mentally well, we cannot help someone else.” As community experts, CHW/Ps were tasked with adapting the workshops to the context, language, and culture of their local communities across the state.

The workshops were offered in Spanish, with English interpretation available, and held over video conference calls in the evenings to allow more participants to join. As a result, they reached over 600 CHW/Ps. CA CEAL researcher and lead workshop facilitator Patricia Rodriguez Espinosa, Ph.D., M.P.H., associate director of research at the Office of Community Engagement at Stanford University School of Medicine, shared her enthusiasm for the community’s participation. “We were impressed [that] over 300 CHW/Ps would participate live on a Thursday night. This really emphasized the community need for these capacity-building workshops.”

Mayra Rubio-Diaz, special project manager for the Community Engagement core group at the Southern California Clinical and Translational Science Institute, stated that their CHW/P partners each conducted three or more presentations, totaling over 100 regional workshops. Rubio-Diaz emphasized the value of the community knowledge held by promotores, particularly in identifying where to provide resources. She shared two powerful examples: one promotor distributed mental health pamphlets written in Spanish to workers outside a local Home Depot, and another promotora gave a mental health presentation to parents in the waiting room of a Tae Kwon Do class. These stories demonstrate the unique ability of CHW/Ps as community experts to meet community members where they are.

The impact of these far-reaching workshops is shown in a story shared with the team months after the end of the workshop series. A local promotora conducted one-on-one mental health sessions with a community member who had not left her home since losing her job during the COVID-19 pandemic. By the end of their time together, the community member was back at work, and the promotora shared how moved she was by the experience.

CA CEAL continues to serve its geographically, linguistically, and culturally diverse state through its strong academic-community partner network that adapts information to local communities. The powerful influence of the workshop series will continue, as future topics to be explored by the advisory board include health promotion for older adults, expanded mental health resources, and navigating the immigration process.

Access the Community Health Workers and Promotores Workshop Series