Our calendars are booked and busy with Mental Health First Aid trainings! Earlier this year, we started offering free MHFA courses to youth-serving agencies in an effort to equip primarily Spanish-speaking communities to recognize early signs of mental health and substance use challenges, reduce stigma, and connect youth to resources. By training and certifying Spanish-speaking Instructors, we hope to build capacity for early intervention and address disparities. So far, we have 6 bilingual instructors and have certified over 20 first-aiders. Overall feedback from first-aiders has been very positive! Participants have reported improved communication through relationship-based outreach and safer spaces for immigrants.
Over the summer, Melanie Maldonado and Joey Rodriguez led a two-day MHFA course at Cambridge Community Center. Olivia Helfrich-Tapia and Steve Erazo Vasquez led another two-day course at the Cambridge Community Center, where 10 new First-Aiders were certified. Our next course, led by Melanie and Steve, will be on October 7th and 14th in Spanish. We'll be training the families involved with the Home for Little Wanderers, a child welfare agency with several community-based and residential programs.
We will continue offering free MHFA trainings throughout the year. We aim to train a minimum of 80 individuals and certify 15 Instructors statewide. We are continuing to reach out to personal contacts and relevant organizations, and we would love to connect with anyone you know who may be interested in receiving free training, in English or Spanish, virtually or in-person.
We are going through the final edits of our paper! At this stage, we are working to make sure that the manuscript is readable, polished, and thoroughly descriptive. Our next team meeting is on September 30, during which we will review Dr. Ruiz-Yu's edits and plan next steps for submission to a journal. We're excited to share our final seven themes that we identified after holding 4 focus groups last year, and detail the barriers that are facing Spanish-speaking communities when seeking early psychosis services.
We are currently preparing for the 2025 National Latino Psychological Association conference in Edinburg, Texas. This conference runs from October 16-19, and SALUD will be sending Olivia and Melanie to present our poster, An Exploratory Inductive Thematic Analysis of Focus Groups with Spanish-Speaking Clinicians in Clinical High Risk and Early Psychosis Services in Massachusetts. Click here to see the poster! We hope that this conference will provide an opportunity to connect with and learn from Latinx providers who may have their own initiatives aimed at supporting Spanish-speaking providers and clients. Anyone interested in attending in person or virtually can do so at this link.
On November 3rd and 4th, we will also be attending the Mass-STEP Conference at Bentley University. At this conference, we will be presenting our poster, Mental Health First Aid for Spanish-Speaking Communities: Bridging Language Gaps and Expanding Capacity for the Non-clinical Crisis Workforce. In this poster, we'll be discussing our progress with MHFA trainings and the impact it has had on the communities we've reached thus far. This conference offers a more focused opportunity to connect with folks who specifically work on Early Psychosis in Massachusetts. Anyone interested in attending in person or virtually can do so at this link.