Kaiser Permanente gives Sonoma County bicultural training program $275,000

The Healthcare Foundation Northern Sonoma County is the recipient of a $275,000 grant from Kaiser Permanente to help support its bicultural clinical training program, the foundation recently announced.

The group also received a $44,000 grant from the Peter E. Haas Jr. Family Fund for the online training component of the program.

The program is designed to strengthen the pipeline of bilingual and bicultural mental health practitioners, and to increase direct mental health services for northern Sonoma County residents without easy access, according to the foundation. The program began last month.

Humanidad Therapy and Education Services of Santa Rosa and San Francisco-based On the Margins are collaborators on the project, according to the organizations led by Executive Director Juan Torres and CEO Dr. Daniela Domínguez, respectively.

Humanidad is providing two traineeships in Cloverdale; On the Margins developed the online curriculum, which is open to trainees and already-licensed therapists.

“The staunch support and foresight of Kaiser Permanente and Haas Jr. are a crucial part of this collective effort to close the gap in access to mental health services for our region’s Latinx communities,” Kim Bender, executive director of the health care foundation, stated in the announcement. “We believe the bicultural clinical training program will not only strengthen bilingual/bicultural mental health services locally, but also be a resource and model far beyond northern Sonoma County.”