The Department of Social Work Education is the recipient of a new $1.9 million grant that will be used to train social work students to deliver culturally responsive behavioral health services to the Latino/Hispanic and Hmong populations in the Central Valley region.

With this grant, 19 students in the cohort will each receive a $10,000 training stipend during the course of their two-year master of social work program. Upon graduating, trainees are expected to work in underserved communities that have large Latino/Hispanic and Hmong populations, specifically within the behavioral health setting. The goal is to address the shortage of clinical social workers specializing in behavioral health by removing barriers for serving culturally diverse communities.

“California has an overall shortage of behavioral health professionals, which varies substantially by region,” said Dr. Irán Barrera, professor and chair in the Department of Social Work Education and principal investigator of the project. “The central San Joaquin Valley is especially impacted by the state’s behavioral health professional shortage, with the lowest ratio of clinicians in the state. With this project, we hope to increase the behavioral care workforce here in the region, especially for those serving the Latino/Hispanic and Hmong communities. There is generally a lack of cultural and linguistic knowledge when it comes to these two populations, and our goal is to alleviate the behavioral health care disparities that exist.”

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