“Don’t wait until you die to be reborn.Your past does not define who you are; it’s only muscle that you are building for your future.”
- Mayra Rubio
HOW DO YOU SAY FFN IN SPANISH?
ASK LAS FAVAS!
Spanish-language capacity building for Latine FFN’s
(Friends, Family & Neighbors) who provide childcare services
in their homes.
La Cocina’s community-codesigned initiative for building professional and social-emotional capacity with Latine Friends, Family & Neighbor (FFN) caregivers who provide childcare services in their homes is the beloved ¡Somos las FAVAS! community learning collaborative.
FAVA is the acronym used at La Cocina for our Latines Familias, Amigues y Vecines Apoyandose (FFN’s in English). In Spanish, the words fava, faba, or haba all refer to a bean–a seed that, when planted and cultivated, provides nourishment for many of our Latine communities. FAVAS are similar in their roles as community caregivers who lovingly care for and nourish their families’, friends’, and neighbors’ children in their homes. They are, in fact, gardeners cultivating our future Latine assets.
¡Somos las FAVAS! employs a human-centered approach to codesigning the FAVAS training curricula with them as the primary knowledge recipients and experts, with the parents of the children they care for as critical stakeholders, and even the FAVITAS, or children themselves, as FAVAS “speak for” ways of meeting their complex needs. ¡Somos las FAVAS! is a comprehensive capacity building program that integrates experiential, didactic, and reflective learning processes through the following activities:
65 hours of intensive didactic training, including eight, day-long intensives focused on skills-acquisition that supports relationship-based childcare practices.
24 hours of LiBRC (Liberation-Based Reflective Consultation) and supervision with La Cocina’s Maternal, Infancy & Early Childhood Mental Health (MIECMH) team.
Ongoing clinician-supervised social-emotional screenings and home evaluations conducted by the FAVAS-in-training and in collaboration with children’s parents and/or caregivers.
Toolkits and manipulables provided as part of the training program’s approach to teaching hands-on relational scaffolding through play.
A unique emphasis on reflective processes that promote healthy relationships across systems boundaries and that generate healthy communications between the FAVAS and the parents or caregivers of the children in their care.
Dejando Huellas
This year’s FAVAS cohort is a group of 15 caring, dynamic, and exceedingly active FAVAS who graduated from La Cocina’s intensive training program in late April 2023.
La Cocina’s investors supporting our collaborative and codesign work with our Weld and Larimer county FAVAS are deeply committed to codesigning equity in childcare systems, including in infancy and early childhood mental health consultation and school-readiness health & social-emotional wellbeing. ¡Somos las FAVAS! is funded through grant funding provided by the Bohemian Foundation and the Colorado Health Foundation. Investors interested in learning more about ¡Somos las FAVAS! may contact La Cocina at hola@lacocinahome.org
CAMPEONES DE LA SALUD (CDLS) MEANS HEALTHCARE SYSTEMS CHAMPIONS
The Campeones de la Salud (CDLS) five-partner initiative is a collaborative evaluation and research initiative that cultivates and promotes empathic communication, reflective consultation, and patient-led codesign activities between Latine and/or Hispanic-identified patients and primary health providers, health system navigators, and clinic administrators.
Serving as Clinical Convener, La Cocina’s participation in the CDLS four-county initiative has resulted in a pilot program that invites Latine patients and healthcare providers to confidential group spaces where both can build caring connections and reflect together in the interest of building shared meaning and shared narratives. Early results suggest that Self-Caring Dialogues may reduce burnout, increase empathy, and increase a sense of purposeful community through semi-structured facilitated dialogues where both patients and healthcare providers can find connection through shared experiences, three-way listening and by applying Liberation-Based Reflective Consultation (LiBRC) principles to the discomfort that arises when groups acknowledge the impacts of difference and social location in the context of health-based services provision.
Want to learn more? Subscribe to our CDLS updates by sending an email to Alejandra Magaña, Director of Operations & Community Codesign at amagana@lacocinahome.org
In addition to leading formative work that builds empathy and reduces burnout through our Self-Caring Dialogues, La Cocina is also proud to have contributed to CDLS Data Sprint events in Eagle County, Garfield County and Mesa County, Colorado.
Codesigned with Latine patients who have been negatively impacted by the many disparities that limit all aspects of the primary health care system, Data Sprint events are community participatory action research activities that elevate the voice and power of Latine communities. During CDLS Data Sprint Events, community members were invited to share examples of the most generative and supportive ways and spaces that patients have found, either on their own and/or with the support of people in the healthcare system, to address system inequities. Structured as a celebration of community life and purposeful action, the CDLS Data Sprint events held to date in Colorado's mountain regions provided researchers with meaningful insight into what and how health systems can reduce patient burnout, reduce disparities by applying a relational approach to healthcare delivery, and how to use the CDLS Data Sprint events to build a generative toolkit for Latine-centered health services.
Stay tuned for important updates on all CDLS activities as La Cocina and its partners close out the data collection phase of this research program and as our teams move to disseminate information through Talks led by our community researchers and through written materials and products that elevate Latine-centered knowledge, voice, and power.
Want to learn more? Email Alejandra Magaña, Director of Operations & Community Codesign at amagana@lacocinahome.org
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Eagle County Department of Public Health & Environment is the lead agency and project manager for the Campeones de la Salud initiative.
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Colorado State University (CSU) and Metropolitan State University (MSU) are co-leading all CDLS evaluation activities.
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L’Ancla is La Cocina’s primary partner leading all community participatory and community-engaged codesign work, including by designing the overall frame of community-based activities deployed in Garfield, Lake, and Mesa counties.
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La Cocina is the clinical convener and the leading agency codesigning the Self-Caring Dialogues/Diálogos de Autocuidado intervention with participants across four Colorado counties.
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Partners Engaged in Achieving Health, or PEACHnet, is part of the University of Colorado Anschutz School of Medicine and provides support for this initiative’s practice-based research by engaging their network of healthcare providers in western Colorado.
Campeones de la Salud (CDLS) is funded through a federal grant awarded by the Office of Minority Health (OMH). Funders and/or additional partners interested in supporting CDLS may contact La Cocina at hola@lacocinahome.org.
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