Your Voice Matters

“Tu voz importa / Your Voice Matters” is photovoice project with youth and women in Latino farmworker families in Northern California. In partnership with professional researcher and photographer Robyne Hayes, this project will focus on a group of approximately 20 migrants, consisting of a series of educational and experiential workshops that will assist participants in learning how to use the cameras, ultimately being empowered to tell their own stories about their own lives. The project will amplify the unique voices of youth and women by harnessing their artistic abilities to tell their own stories. The outcomes are a series of evocative images and stories that highlight issues that matter most to them, images that will be presented to the community through a public exhibition at a later date.

Through the sharing of images and stories, our project can contribute to changing the current, national narrative of immigrants, moving away from the vilification to instead develop a more compassionate understanding, counteracting the established narrative of "us" versus "them." With these barriers removed, the resilience of the immigrant community can be recognized for the commonality they share with all of us during this exceptionally difficult time.

To that end, our goal is to facilitate pathways for dialogue and action between farmworkers and the community. In order to make this goal a reality, we are asking for your help! Please consider participating in our fundraiser, which will help us secure our remaining materials for instruction, preparation, and exhibition. Every dollar counts.

This collaboration also includes the E Center Migrant Seasonal Head Start, which will serve as the official liaison between MCN and the initiative participants, with Chico State University also providing structural support. This project is similarly being supported through generous contributions from sponsors UCEF - Friends of the Arts, in conjunction with BCAC.tv.

This project was made possible with the support from California Humanities, a nonprofit partner of the National Endowment for the Humanities. Visit calhum.org.

Support Witness to Witness

Clinician burnout and moral injury. Helplessness in the face of cruel policies. Overwhelmed by the inability to serve all those in need.  The people who intersect with the current immigration system – those on the frontlines of caring for immigrants, like health care professionals, community health workers, as well as advocates, attorneys, caseworkers – are suffering as they feel unable to sufficiently provide the kinds of services they know their clients need. Even journalists who cover immigration are suffering!

The Witness to Witness program (W2W) helps the helpers so they can sustain their vital work. We link a frontline worker with a volunteer therapist to provide individualized one-on-one support. We coordinate and facilitate peer support groups, provide webinars, and offer consultation to strengthen individual and organizational resilience.

We’ve reached hundreds of frontline workers: health care providers along the US-Mexico border who are in shock at the violence and desperation their asylum-seeking patients share; social service workers in communities struggling to recover from climate-fueled disasters like in Paradise, California after the fires; and legal aid workers fighting to get their clients out of detention.

We’ve tapped a deep need among immigrant and migrant advocates -- and the need is growing.  Our services are free or sliding scale, and we need your support to make sure we can offer these popular and much-needed services as widely as we can.

Here’s what our partners say:

“I share with my W2W volunteer what I cannot say to anyone else. It’s such an important release.
It helps me carry on.”
- Health care worker in Denver, CO

“I feel so grateful for this model, this way of working, and to you for implementing it…. I believe things would be different if everyone working here was receiving this kind of partnership.”
- Counselor, New York City

“The Witness to Witness program has offered me incredible individual, group, and organizational support. I am so grateful to W2W for sharing their expertise and knowledge with those of us providing direct legal services to low-income immigrants and refugees across the country. W2W truly cares for the caregivers, and I could not be more thankful.”
- Attorney, Memphis, TN

A volunteer therapist with Witness to Witness had this to say:

“This has been a deeply moving experience for me. These partnerships have offered me access to a much-needed sense of agency in the face of injustice I have been alert to, but more typically felt powerless to address. The program has given me an opportunity to be helpful in a meaningful way that supports my preferred self.”

Please help us help the helpers.

Witness to Witness is sponsored by Migrant Clinicians Network, a 501(c)3 nonprofit organization and is affiliated and endorsed by the American Family Therapy Academy.