By Stephanie Alvarez | Director of Development
Dear Friends,
As we navigate through this hot US summer and feel the abundance of the Earth element, we hope you’re healthy and well. One of the bittersweet outgrowths of the past year and a half has been greater awareness of how acute, systemic, and intergenerational trauma affect us individually and collectively. The acknowledgment of how pandemic-related trauma disproportionally affects people of color, first responders, health and essential workers is increasingly part of our national narrative, as is the expanding conversation about how generational and toxic systemic trauma informs the health and well-being of Black, Brown and Native peoples.
Since 2019, AWB has provided treatments to migrating people in Matamoros and Tijuana, Mexico. Thousands of refugees, escaping violence, poverty and torture in their countries of origin, live temporarily in these border cities, waiting for a chance to cross to the United States. Living conditions are grim and trauma is high. Once people cross to the US, living and work conditions usually continue to be extremely challenging. Many find low-paying, physically dangerous work in the agricultural fields of Texas and California, joining communities of farm workers that grow and harvest our food. Just as we provide treatments for refugees in Tijuana and Matamoros, we support farm workers in the agricultural regions of California and are working to expand to other agricultural areas along the US West Coast.
Since our 2021 Spring fundraiser on GlobalGiving, AWB has been carrying out mobile clinics in Sonoma County, CA with the Botanical Bus, as well as monthly clinics in Watsonville with the Center for Farm Worker Families, Livity Rising and the Integrative Healers Action Network (IHAN). In June we resumed our collaboration with the Refugee Health Alliance in Tijuana, providing hundreds of earseed treatments and bringing some much-needed equipment, medical supplies and herbs to our partners on the ground. AWB-trained practitioners from southern CA are offering treatments in refugee shelters twice a month, and we’ve resumed regular service/training trips to work with the Parteras midwives at the Justica en Salud clinic that offers integrative care for refugee women and children.
While our commitment to emergency disaster response continues, we are also strongly focusing on working to address systemic injustice and intergenerational trauma through ongoing clinics. Our objective is to create mental health resilience and contribute to the prevention of mental health issues in at-risk populations. In order to do this, we need to continue finding ways to support our clinics on a monthly basis. Your support has brought us a long way. We hope that we can continue to count on your generosity and commitment to this work - after all, it takes a village!
From the depths of our hearts, we thank you for your love, financial support and moral accompaniment. We would also like to ask you, if you can, to consider becoming a recurring donor so that we can continue to guarantee the financial health of our programs and be able to continue providing mental health care to our communities in need.
Finally, we leave you all with some great pictures from our work in Tijuana and California.
In the Spirit of Service,
The AWB Team
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