Youth Programming
Through our youth services, LPA creates a therapeutic space for newly arrived immigrant youth to establish healthy relationships and build community. As youth share their experiences and lend support to one other, they develop practical means of working through the emotional challenges of being undocumented and/or living with other undocumented family members. They actively help to create confidential communication, a place to process the complicated and often painful stories of migrating to a new community, and the families and relationships left behind.
LPA provides summer programs, group counseling, individual counseling, team-building, and creative arts exercises, a peer mentorship structure, and other activities that build and sustain trust, emotional grounding, and healing. While the curriculum, activities, and discussion topics are developed around the experiences of the youth involved, some or all of the following topics are included:
Fear of deportation
Migratory grief and loss
Isolation from and loss of deported family members
Internalizing family struggles of immigration
Interpersonal trauma
Challenges related to continuing education
As they progress through their individual healing processes, youth also develop the skills necessary to aid other young people to live healthy lives. In this way, the program not only strengthens the individual participants but also becomes a resource to others in the community.
LPA also developed a pilot program called Compas de Viaje (“buddies on the journey”). The “Compas” is a group of immigrant youth who have committed themselves to develop peer mentorship skills, outreach to more newly arrived youth, all in the spirit of relationship and community building. The “Compas” peer mentors receive individual supervision from the clinical staff at LPA and intensive group training in skills like conscientious communication, relationship-building, and inter-personal safety and boundaries.
Blanca Garcia
