Translating our Mindful Caregiving Course into Spanish
The need
Our Mindful Family Caregiving program teaches practical, mindfulness-based tools and techniques to help build caregivers’ emotional resilience, and protect them from overwhelm and burnout. But until recently it was only delivered in English, making it inaccessible to a whole section of the caregiving population in the US.
In 2020 we completed a project with the non-profit the Chinese American Coalition for Compassionate Care (CACCC) to translate our Mindful Family Caregiving program into Mandarin. CACCC has already run 7 courses in Mandarin and has reached over 200 people. (See this blog for more detail)
After the success of our work with CACCC, we turned our attention to Spanish-speaking Latino caregivers, another large caregiving population. There are estimated to be 9 million Latino family caregivers and census data from 2010 – 13 showed that of the 13% of the population (37.5m people) that spoke Spanish at home in the USA, 44% spoke English “less than very well”.
Our approach
We took a two-track approach to our translation. Our first track was finding someone who could teach our course in Spanish. We were looking for someone with a deep mindfulness or Zen practice, who was also a fluent Spanish-speaker. And we found her – our trainee teacher is a highly competent Zen student, with Spanish as her native tongue and who has direct experience of caregiving. This trainee will undertake 20+ hours of training in Mindful Family Caregiving with ZCP, along with multiple observations of teaching and being observed teaching herself.
Our second track was adapting our course to make it culturally and linguistically appropriate for Spanish-speaking Latino caregivers. We have started this process by organizing discussion sessions with staff from Del Mar Caregiver Resource Center, and Promotores connected to Hospice of Santa Barbara who all work closely with Spanish-speaking Latino caregivers. We will be asking them about the unique needs of Latino caregivers, their barriers to support, and what activities, concepts, and language need to change in our course to be relatable for Latino caregivers.
After these discussion groups, we will make changes to our course, and with the support of our trainee, we will translate the entire course and handouts into Spanish. Once translated we hope to run our course, in Spanish, for the communities of the Del Mar Caregiver Resource Center, and those connected to Hospice of Santa Barabara at the end of 2021.
Further information
If you are working with Spanish-speaking family caregivers and would like to discuss a partnership with ZCP, please reach out to naomi@zencaregiving.org.
We would like to express our gratitude to Susan McLaughlin for generously funding this project and making it possible.