BIPOC Mental Health Summit Workshops

The BIPOC Mental Health Summit is a one-day gathering of community members, mental health professionals, advocates, and youth leaders building Oregon's next chapter of mental health equity. Our theme “Healing Together: Across Generations, Across Communities” is grounded in the belief that mental health extends beyond the individual and is a call to action to confront isolation shaped by intergenerational trauma, cultural stigma, and systemic barriers. Learn more about the workshops we're offering, and pick your track below!

Workshop Tracks

1. Community Healing: Explore pathways to healing rooted in culture, community, and lived experience. This track focuses on community empowerment, reducing stigma, multigenerational healing and trauma, and culturally responsive approaches that honor the strengths and traditions of BIPOC communities. 

2. Youth and Young Adult: Designed for students and emerging leaders, this track provides opportunities to build leadership and self-advocacy skills, explore one’s intersectionality, identity, and belonging, and develop the tools needed to create positive change in their communities. Sessions emphasize empowerment, civic engagement, and mental health advocacy.

3. Professional Development: Equip behavioral health professionals, advocates, and community leaders with practical strategies to advance equitable mental health care. Topics include delivering culturally responsive services, utilizing policy and/or advocacy tools, and implementing community-informed practices that promote trust, access, and better outcomes.

Morning Workshops

Track 1: Community Care & Safety as Praxis to Destigmatizing Mental Health Panel Discussion

What does it take to make mental health care feel safe, accessible, and relevant to the communities it serves? Mental health does not exist in isolation or solely within the walls of a therapist’s office. Community care as praxis recognizes that mental well-being is shaped by a person’s culture, relationships, community, and everyday environment. Panelists will discuss approaches to prevention and crisis response, building community capacity to recognize and respond to mental health concerns, and creating safer care pathways for people of color who have historically faced barriers, discrimination, or mistrust within health systems. The conversation will also examine how community-based approaches can help build trust, challenge stigma, and transform how communities experience and engage with care. Together, we will examine how safety, connection, cultural responsiveness, and community empowerment can move mental health care from a reactive service to care models that honor culture, identity, lived experience, and the unique needs of their communities.

Featuring: Martin Lockett, MS, CADC II, Melody Li, LMFT (they/them), Spencer Uemura, CéShaun Hankins, Judith Faustima, and moderated by Yeda Song

Track 2: Mental Health through Sama Samang Pagkilos (Collective Action)

What are the impacts of our surroundings on our mental health? How can coming together to create change build confidence and leadership? This workshop will showcase the work of youth from the Kaya! Kabataan! youth program and local community organizers to change the name of Colonel Summers Park. We will also screen a mini-documentary in progress, expressing the strength of pro-people education and action.

Featuring: Ira Mae Nicolas

Track 3: Sustaining the Frontline: Supporting Suicide Prevention Through Equity

Youth and adults in Oregon experience clear disparities in suicide deaths, especially in communities who face systemic barriers and historic marginalization. Culturally specific providers are often the first people these communities turn to for support. These providers bring lived experience, cultural knowledge, and trusted relationships — but they also carry heavy workload demands, chronic exposure to system level harm, and burnout. This session shares how the Behavioral Health Equity & Community Partnerships team is shifting how we work with culturally specific partners. Instead of a transactional, paperwork heavy relationship, we are practicing radical listening and space holding — showing up without a preset agenda, learning directly from providers, and centering the needs of communities instead of system requirements. These practices are anti oppressive because they remove unnecessary burdens and make room for community leadership. We also describe how this way of partnering helps sustain Oregon’s culturally specific workforce. When our providers feel heard, respected, and supported, they can continue delivering suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention services that save lives. This approach does not claim to be a “framework,” but it does build the foundation for one in the future.

Featuring: Roberto Osorio

‍Afternoon Workshops

Track 1: Sanando Collective Trauma through Our Activismo & Cultura

Join us to explore the history and research behind migration, anti-immigrant sentiment, and collective trauma experienced by Latino immigrants. Together, we will also dive into the rich history of our activismo and cultura, learning how we can lean into these roots to find strength, resistance, and healing.

Featuring: Faviola Robles Saenz, PhD

Track 2: We Are Mental Health: Impact of Youth Peer-to-Peer Training in BIPOC Communities

Join Devin Thongdy, Ron Sagun, and Minh Nguyen as they present about what Youthline is, topics in BIPOC Youth Mental Health, and the importance of Peer Support in the healing process within BIPOC communities. Closing out the presentation, we are excited to open up the workshop into a Q&A with Youth Panelists, featuring Xutong Hei, Keem Gian, Ron Sagun, Minh Nguyen, as well as Devin Thongdy as the moderator. We hope to answer any questions relating to the work that we do!

Featuring: Devin Thongdy, Ron Sagun, and Minh Nguyen

Track 3:‍ Holding Both: Clinical Practice for BIPOC Therapists Working With White Clients in Portland, Oregon

The workshop aims to help participants identify common clinical dynamics such as cultural taxation, racialized transference and countertransference, and expectations of racial labor when working with white clients. It emphasizes ethical, sustainable practice strategies, including boundary-setting and consultation practices aligned with the ACA Code of Ethics. The workshop also incorporates creative arts techniques to explore the relationship between personal/cultural identity and professional clinical identity.

The training promotes reflection, community building, and self-care among BIPOC clinicians working in predominantly white settings. It includes practical tools such as self-assessment and artistic expression to support clinicians' ongoing resilience and cultural competence.

Featuring: Marie Mellberg, LPC (she/her)

Special Session

Reclaiming the Power of Storytelling through Poetry

What stories shape our sense of self, and what leads us to believe in those stories? How can poetry support our mental health, especially for those intimidated by the genre? In this workshop, we’ll explore how the expansive nature and permissions of poetry can help us connect with ourselves, each other, and the world around us. From the personal to the political, we’ll engage with poems and have a chance to create some, too. Participants can expect to leave the workshop with tips and exercises for accessing the power of poetry, with the gentle reminder that this storytelling tool belongs to all of us.

Featuring: Christopher Diaz

Read more about our speakers here!

Tickets are still available, join us at the BIPOC Mental Health Summit!

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