A project led by UW–Madison’s Stephen Quintana that’s designed to strengthen mental health services for Madison’s Latinx community is receiving a $1 million grant over the next five years from the Wisconsin Partnership Program.
“The grant addresses ethnic and racial disparities in access to culturally and linguistically competent mental health services by Spanish-speaking and bilingual members of Latinx communities,” says Quintana, a professor and chair of the School of Education’s Department of Counseling Psychology.
This project will also help increase the number of trained professionals to serve Latinx communities through a partnership with the graduate psychology and counseling programs in the School of Education, specifically for native Spanish speakers.
The grant provides support to recruit and then train graduate students to deliver mental health services with bicultural and bilingual (Spanish-English) fluency. The few graduate programs that offer this deep level of preparation are in regions with large Latinx populations, such as California, Florida, and Texas.
UW–Madison will be the first to provide this innovative training in a region where the Latinx community finds itself in relative linguistic, cultural, and ethnic isolation.
The new program will be contextualized within community needs and will address the public health needs for a sufficient and capable workforce. This will be accomplished through the training and supervision of Spanish-speaking Latinx graduate students in the School of Education’s departments of Counseling Psychology, Educational Psychology, and Rehabilitation Psychology and Special Education.
The community-university partnership will also support the expansion of community programs, bi-directional training, and evaluation that is respectful of community wellness and well-being.
This Community Impact Grant was awarded to Centro Hispano of Dane County and its academic and community partners. Community Impact Grant awards are distributed via the Wisconsin Partnership Program within the UW School of Medicine and Public Health.