About Us
La Plaza: Nuestra Cultura Cura is a *Latine created and directed healing program in Santa Rosa, California. La Plaza is built on the essential understanding that culture heals – La Cultura Cura.
Our Vision:
La Plaza is committed to promote and enhance the health and well-being of all community members with our focus on our Latine population. We raise awareness and reduce mental health stigma by building on our cultural strengths to uplift our community to heal. We do this by working collaboratively with resources, agencies, and communities to implement innovative culturally defined practices to address mental health needs in our collective communities.
The Urgent Need: Improving Mental Health in the Latine Community
We all experience different levels of struggle, challenges, hardships, and joy throughout our lives. As a community, we must find solutions for providing low-cost, effective healing practices that meet the unique cultural needs of our children, youth, families and elders.
In Sonoma County, we need more culturally and linguistically appropriate mental health services, and relatable ways to talk about our emotional needs, our struggles, and our well-being in order to get the appropriate support.
La Plaza offers:
A welcoming place for gathering, and the creation of a new cultural norm for wellness
A practice space for emerging leaders to try out new skills and roles in the community where they can learn to design and lead healing activities for themselves and others
La Plaza is different from other mental health programs because it pairs clinical, therapy-based services with familiar healing practices and cultural experiences that invite us all to reclaim our own ability to heal
We create a bridge for community directly to cultural and linguistically appropriate clinical services when needed
Most importantly, La Plaza offers community an opportunity to come together to heal from trauma and the immense impacts it has on our lives
*Latine is a gender-neutral form of the word Latino, created by gender non-binary and feminist communities in Spanish-speaking countries. The objective of the term is to remove gender from Spanish, by replacing it with the gender-neutral Spanish letter E, which can already be found in words like estudiante.
La Plaza Founders
