Your Life. Your Story. Latino Youth Summit: Building Latino Adolescent Resilience Through a Successful Community-Academic Partnership

Abstract

Developing successful relationships between academia and community can be difficult. Investigators who want to work with community organizations often do not know where to start, or how to carry them out well. However, successful collaborations can speed up the transition from research to practice, and bring interventions to communities more effectively. We present the development of a successful partnership and the consequent intervention program, Your Life. Your Story., a yearlong resiliency-building intervention for Latino youth at risk for depression. We present the exploratory study where our relationship began, as well as the preliminary findings that led to the design of our intervention. We then present the detailed components of the resiliency-building, emotional expression, coping and social support intervention. We also present preliminary qualitative and quantitative results and show the yearlong intervention plan. Throughout, we show, in sections in italics, how the partnership guaranteed that the study and intervention would succeed.