Youth Community Organizing: Our year-round afterschool and summer Youth Community Organizing program engages young people, ages 14-18, as Youth Community Organizers (YCOs) to organize and implement bilingual, culturally-relevant grassroots campaigns that engage, inform, and mobilize hundreds of community members and youth of color. These campaigns focus on education reform, youth mental health, social media, and more. All of our YCOs participate in intensive community organizing training and bi-monthly work readiness, academic skill building, and cultural exploration activities.

Health Educators en Acción: Our year-round afterschool and summer program engages young people, ages 14-18, to implement bilingual, culturally-relevant health education activities and peer-to-peer workshops around sexual health, mental health and wellness, and physical wellness. Through partnerships with local hospitals, health centers, and community-based organizations, our young people receive robust training in health disparities and evidence-based interventions. Armed with this knowledge, they lead awareness campaigns, health and wellness activities, and sexual health workshops that support Latine families to adopt healthier lifestyles.

Environmental and Food Justice: Our year-round afterschool and summer program engages young people, ages 14-18, to implement bilingual, culturally-relevant activities that focus on environmental sustainability and food accessibility. They receive intesive training in climate change, sustainable gardening, and food access. With this knowledge, our young people manage hydroponic systems in our building and the community garden at The Tobin Community Center, create sustainable products from recycled textiles, provide workshops on nutrition education, and more.

Health & wellness

Sociedad Latina’s Health and Wellness Initiative was established in response to the negative mental health impact on our youth and families during the COVID-19 pandemic. While we historically utilize a holistic, trauma-informed approach that supports the social-emotional development of our young people, we recognized the importance of tailoring our program structure and design, and organizational philosophy, to provide a safe, nurturing place for our youth and families to foster positive emotional and physical health, while learning the skills to take ownership of their self-care and build their self-advocacy skills.

Our program components include bi-annual wellness check-in sessions between our Wellness Manager and young people - with the support of PhD candidates in Social Work from Boston University’s Wheelock College of Education and Human Development -, the establishment of a Youth Wellness Committee, and adapting and delivering Yale University’s “The Science of Well-Being” curriculum.

Our Youth Wellness Committee, a cohort of ten young people from across our Youth Leader program, worked in collaboration with Tufts University Tisch College Community Research Center to develop and distribute a bilingual survey for their study "Exploring Social Media Usage and Youth Well-Being". This survey was designed to better understand the impact of social media use on the wellbeing of teenagers ages 14-19, including time spent on social media platforms, which social media platforms are most used, and how social media affects wellness. Members of our staff were approved by the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to distribute the survey to our Youth Leaders in the spring of 2024.

teens in tech

Sociedad Latina’s Youth Leaders have been addressing the connection between social media and internet usage and youth mental health through their “Teens in Tech” campaign. Through this campaign, all of our young people participate in the Screenagers curriculum, which focuses on educating youth about the well-being of technology usage and bringing awareness to current policies related to online safety and privacy. They also conduct advocacy around different legislation pertaining to youth safety with internet and social media usage (like KOSA and COPPA), as well as train their peers and families about strategies to have a safer, healthier relationship with the internet and social media. Our youth are implementing this work with the generous support of Boston Children’s Hospital.

Check-out the advocacy videos that our youth created to bring awareness to the legislation they researched and their commitment to implementing more strategies in their daily lives to balance their tech usage.