(WXYZ) — Hispanic Heritage Month continues through the middle of October, and we want to highlight one program helping students at Ypsilanti Community High School.
It's called the Latinx Youth Empowerment Series, also known as "YES." The group connects and provides mental health services to immigrant students. Those students, many of the program's designers say, may not have had access to those services otherwise.
Dr. Fernanda Cross is one of the people who work with the group. Now an assistant professor at the University of Michigan School of Social Work, Cross is an immigrant herself who came to the U.S. from Brazil over two decades ago.
Cross' first language is Portuguese, and she knew just a handful of English words before leaving home.
"I just felt so powerless. No matter how much I wanted I couldn’t communicate," she said. "You notice that others don’t really take you seriously because they can’t understand you or they can’t understand your accent, no matter how intelligent and how eloquent you are in your native language."
Cross parlayed her lived experience into a career, first working as a translator for courts. Wanting to get involved, she became a social worker, then got her PhD in the field, all to give back to other Latinx immigrants.
"Immigrating is difficult. The children are having to do a lot of the navigating the new culture. They’re navigating the new language for the parents as they are learning the language themselves," Cross said.
Because of that unique responsibility, she and three community partners came together to help the students at Ypsilanti Community High School who are new to the U.S. They connect them with providers and talk about mental health.
"These students were very likely never going to see a provider if it had not been for these groups," Cross said. "So that all the sessions were conducted in Spanish and drawing from cultural responsive curriculum that we developed and incorporated aspects of the student’s cultures in the activities in the examples given In the music, in some of the - even the language that they were using, using different slangs."
The pilot group had nearly 20 students in the spring of 2022. The two following have been capped at 12 students. They meet weekly during lunch for all Spanish group therapy, but Cross said interest keeps growing, as many students have someone as close as a parent, or they themselves, are undocumented.
"For the adolescents that come from undocumented parents, there’s always This constant fear of getting separated from the family. Having one of the caregivers deported or being deported themselves in case the adolescents," she said.
YES has such an impact. The Michigan Health Endowment Foundation is funding six additional groups over the next two years. The six-week program will also stretch to eight weeks. The fall group starts in two weeks with the six-week schedule.
"Now once they have been through it and they’re connected with how coverage they know how helpful it is. They feel empowered in the future if they need it again they know that there is support out there," Cross said.
