This dissertation employs a qualitative community-based participatory research design to engage comunidades Indígenas living in Los Angeles, California, in exploring their perspectives on limitations and strengths in attaining their well-being, such as health, mental health, and community well-being. Using photovoice, comunidades Indígenas were centered, through pictures and narratives, as they identify community action-oriented issues to support their health, mental health, wellness, and ancestral practices. Supporting traditional ancestral ways of knowing and traditional wellness practices supports a decolonial approach to avoid the erasure or ongoing colonization of Indigenous practices to promote Indigenous well-being. This photovoice study occurred in a Westlake, Los Angeles, California, urban community garden with community members who lived near this garden. A snowball sampling method was used to recruit co-collaborators (n=13) who identified as belonging to a comunidad Indígena from a Latin American country. The thirteen participants, referred to as co-collaborators, participated in an introduction and consent process (phase 1), a photovoice training (phase 2), a focus group (phase 3) to identify themes related to well-being and culminated with a community-based public photo exhibit (phase 4) to advocate for community change. This action-oriented, community-based participatory photovoice study can bring awareness about the oppression and discrimination comunidades Indígenas experience by engaging these communities in a more culturally responsive way that honors their autonomy and equity. Future research implications are the importance of avoiding the clustering of comunidades Indígenas under the Latinx/e monolith, as this can exclude Indigenous groups that have resisted colonization. The co-collaborators shared their lived experiences and perspectives through photovoice and a focus group. The co-collaborators identified themes of strengths such as Salud de la Comunidad (Community Health) and Salud Mental (Mental Health) and barriers such as: Acceso al Arte (Access to Art), Bienestar para los ñiños (Well-being for the Children), Desigualdad (Inequality), Dificil dejar tu lugar de origen (Difficulty Leaving Your Place of Origin), Inmigración (Immigration), Limpieza Comunitaria (Community Cleanliness), Más Espacios Verdes (More Green Spaces), Racismo (Racism), Seguridad Comunitaria (Community Safety). Policy implications that need to be considered are immigration reform, Indigenous language accessibility, language preservation, and Indigenous group preservation and protection. The social work implications identified are the need to understand the diversity in language, culture, and ancestral practices. Theoretical implications are the need for flexibility in applying a critical race lens as this study applied CRT, LatCrit, and Critical Latinx Indigeneities to gain an understanding of the systemic barriers that comunidades Indígenas navigate. This photovoice study has led ongoing discussions within the community on ways to support their health, mental health, and well-being from their lived experience.

Children and youth in foster care experience poor K-12 educational outcomes compared to their peers without foster care histories. Child welfare and school professionals hold shared responsibility for ensuring their educational well-being based on federal policies and role expectations. However, professionals often experience challenges in effectively collaborating with one another to support the educational of children and youth in foster care. Guided by ecological systems and critical theory, this mixed methods explanatory sequential design explored the facilitators and barriers that child welfare professionals, school professionals, and professional caregivers viewed as promoting and hindering effective interprofessional collaboration between child welfare and school professionals. The quantitative phase involved the analysis of surveys (N = 136) collected from child welfare professionals, school professionals, and professional caregivers in an urban county in the Southwest. In the qualitative phase, interviews and focus groups were conducted with a subsample of survey participants (N = 22). Facilitators of interprofessional collaboration included: centering the best interests of the child, opportunities and capacity to meaningfully engage, effective communication, positive and trusting relationships, being knowledgeable about the child, policies, roles, and systems, and empathy towards other professionals. Barriers of interprofessional collaboration included: competing priorities or agendas, unmanageable workloads and limited time, little to no timely communication, weak ties and mistrust, limited knowledge about the child, policies, roles, and systems, and biases towards professional caregivers and other professionals. The overall findings have multiple implications for social work practice, policy, research, and education to enhance collaboration between professionals to better serve children and youth in foster care.

The United States has historically been perceived as a “nation of immigrants'' dueto its eclectic racial and ethnic make-up. Nonetheless, the nation’s relationship and attitudes towards immigrants have been predominantly negative, especially with Latinx immigrants. The criminalization of Latinx immigration has led to an array of poor psychosocial outcomes for those who arrive and remain within the United States. Numerous studies have found a significant positive relationship between discrimination and elevated rates of depression, anxiety, and stress among Latinx immigrants. Seeing that Latinxs are projected to become 25% of the U.S. population by 2060, there is an urgent need for the development of culturally-affirming interventions grounded on protective factors unique to this population. This study sought to expand on the current literature surrounding the relationship between discrimination and poor mental health outcomes in Latinx immigrants, by determining whether hope and optimism serve as protective factors. Findings from a multi-step linear regression analysis showed that hope and optimism do have a significant moderation effect on Latinx mental health outcomes. Nonetheless, results varied by gender and mental health construct between depression, anxiety, and stress. The findings from this study provide an additional antidote for ameliorating the pernicious effects of discrimination concerning this cultural group. Recommendations informed by these findings are made for social work practice, policy reform, and research.