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Lending a Hand to Achieve Our Goals
Donations made to PASEO Salud Mental allow us to provide free capacity building to communities in Peru; this includes training teachers, nurses, lawyers, social workers, and psychologists in techniques to meet the mental health needs of their clients.
It also includes providing assessments for children with disabilities who are not able to access services because of a lack of trained professionals in the area who can provide them with appropriate documentation of their disability.
Sometimes we also seek funding for special projects or campaigns. PASEO Salud Mental is a public charity, IRC Section 501(c)(3), and donations made are tax-deductible under IRC Section 170.
Student Scholarship Fund
The cost of PASEO Summer Immersion Program is kept as low as possible; however, it is important to us as an organization working on Peruvian soil to pay our local teachers, community partners, and homestay families a competitive and decent wage. The cost of the program can be prohibitive to certain students in the U.S., keeping them from attaining the training needed to provide high-quality mental health services in Spanish.
Serving the Latinx community in the U.S. is a job that is often underpaid, and can involve significant exploitation, as students are asked to go beyond their boundaries of competence in order to provide services to Spanish-speakers that would otherwise be nonexistent. At PASEO, we do not want to be part of an additional financial burden on these students; we want to help them practice in an ethical and culturally-affirming way, while also recognizing their worth, value, and unique contribution to the field.
In 2022, we are hoping to raise $5,000 in student scholarships. Help us reach our goal by donating using the button below!
Capacity Building Projects
Every year, the PASEO team provides more than 100 hours of pro bono capacity building to our partner sites as well as to organizations in Peru and Guatemala that cannot access mental health services or mental health training.
For example, in 2018 we provided training in psychological first aid to lawyers, social workers, and psychologists who work in areas marked by community and familial violence.
We also provided training on compassion fatigue and secondary trauma to staff working in a domestic violence center in Peru, and training for residential staff at a center for girls affected by sexual and physical violence in methods of trauma-informed residential care. We trained teachers working in some of the most under-resourced regions in Peru in how to identify and respond to common mental health concerns in teenagers, given that there are no mental health professionals in this region to assist with this.
Finally, we conducted an intensive 10-month training for community-based psychologists in methods for treating interpersonal and complex trauma. It is a privilege to be able to go into these communities and provide this support, and it remains an important part of the PASEO mission.
Donating to this campaign helps us purchase the materials necessary for trainings and get to remote communities in order to provide these services, as well as hire local professionals to provide assistance in making sure the trainings are culturally, contextually, and linguistically appropriate. None of the money donated here goes to PASEO staff salaries, but rather directly to the capacity building projects.
