UCA WAVES – Youth Mental Health Collaborative

WAVES – Wellness. Advocacy. Voices. Education. Support.
Dear UCA Friends,
 
We deeply grieve the tragedies that occurred this past week in Monterey Park and Half Moon Bay. When our community should have been celebrating Lunar New Year, we were shocked to learn that gun massacres had taken the lives of 17 people and injured 11 others, most of whom were Asian American. Monterey Park is a Los Angeles community with rich cultural history, and 65% of its residents identify as AAPI. Half Moon Bay, a small town south of San Francisco, is home to a low-income farming community, of which many members immigrated from Latin America and Asia, often surviving in labor encampments and toiling long hours under poor conditions for extremely low pay.

U.S. Rep. Grace Meng tweeted in response to the Monterey Park shootings: “We don’t know motives yet, but I wonder how things could’ve been different had there been a strong mental health and social service network. Yes, it’s about gun safety laws, yes, it’s about stopping Asian hate, but also a generation of #AAPI elders with a life of unaddressed trauma.” As a youth mental health collaborative, UCA WAVES is committed to addressing the mental health needs of Asian American families. We are reminded by these tragedies to carefully attend to intergenerational dialogue, as well as to care deeply for our elders. 
 
Mass shootings are far too frequent in our American society. While messages like this could never capture the depth of our sorrow and the urgency we feel about reforms to prevent future tragedies, we urge everyone in the UCA WAVES community to come together in solidarity. If you have the means, please consider donating to the Monterey Park Lunar New Year Victims Fund and the Half Moon Bay Farmworker Shooting & Flood Victims Fund. Regardless of what action steps you choose to take, please make sure to care for your own mental health – as more information continues to surface, consider taking a break from the news, which can be distressing and overwhelming, and checking out the following resources:
 
UCA and the WAVES Team
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Want to support WAVES through a donation?

Donation through Zelle (bank direct transfer):

waves.donate@ucausa.org

Please provide your email address when donating via Zelle. 

Other ways to donate:

https://ucausa.org/uca-2022-holiday-fundraising/

Thank you so much for supporting us! Your generous donation helps UCA WAVES continue to lead our community in AAPI mental health work, through awareness, education, and discussion, while also helping us continue to care for our members and support their wellbeing.

WAVES programs are funded by Clinical Scholars, a program supported by Robert Wood Johnson Foundation