Group Activities for Latino/a Youth

Book excerpt: Directly applicable to practice, Group Activities for Latino/a Youth allows helping professionals such as human service workers, social workers, and school and community mental health counselors to select and apply a series of group sessions with topics relevant to today’s Latino/a youth. Each session contains detailed directions, suggested discussion questions, and additional readings on specific topics, with topic examples including grief, identity development, and conflict resolution. Sessions draw on Latino/a cultural norms and strengths to build culturally-informed communication and coping skills in an effort to improve educational, social, and career outcomes. A developmental perspective is used, and sessions are designed to be creative and interactive in order to appeal to the high energy and playfulness of youth at any age. Group Activities for Latino/a Youth helps professionals to better engage and retain Latino/a clients, a group that traditionally experiences one of the largest drop-out rates in therapy, often due to interventions largely informed by dominant Anglo norms and traditions.