Walk the journey of an inspiring human rights advocate who hails from Latin America. Claudia is a rare combination of both counsellor and councillor: a fierce believer in the power of socialism and person-centred therapy. From her childhood marked by poverty, racism, and intergenerational trauma to her work as a counsellor, Claudia’s experiences are insightful and compelling, and her belief in mental health as a fundamental human right.
Mick Cooper and John Wilson’s conversation with Claudia navigates through her life in the UK, her work with Hackney Council, and her role in the Words Matter campaign. Claudia’s work centres around bringing issues of social injustice, poverty, and race into her practice in the most compassionate way. We delve deep into the intersection of politics and therapy and how the role of therapists can extend into the political sphere. As we explore the effects of social inequalities on mental health, we also underscore the importance of holding the government accountable for the mental health of its citizens.
Towards the end of our discussion, Claudia shares her unique vision of making supervision available for all professions. This episode is a profound exploration of the powerful connection between social injustice and mental health. Claudia’s journey from a migrant to a counsellor to a councillor, her understanding of the intersectionality in therapy and politics, and her dream to make a difference in the world is a testament to courage and resilience.
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Claudia emigrated from Bolivia to Britain in 2003 and has lived and raised her family in Hackney, London since then.
She is passionate about socio economic independence and the impact hardship and exclusion have on mental health and personal development. Claudia has worked fighting for community cohesion through trade unionism demanding workers rights, women’s rights, migrants rights and wider communities rights to access education and health.
Claudia has passionately led campaigns for mental health to be our human right, most recently in her role as elected Councillor and former Mental Health Champion for the London Borough of Hackney she achieved the adoption of the Mental Health a Human Right for All motion making it the very first local authority in the country and probably the world to adopt a UN High Commissioner’s recommendation on mental health and human rights.
Claudia is a longstanding trade unionist, former Treasurer and current member of UVW trade union, a migrant led union that has achieved great successes and insourcing victories for migrant workers across London. She started defending workers rights after realising that many workers, including herself, experience racism, exploitation and modern slavery.
The transformative social reforms that have lifted millions out of poverty in her native socialist Bolivia underpins the mission vision and values for her work as a community representative and advocate for universal care for all.
In 2018, Claudia founded a free counselling project that has provided over hundreds of free therapy to families and young people across East London. She supports bereaved families of young people lost to youth violence.
As part of the circular economy Claudia feels so passionate about, she believes exchanging knowledge is part what our circular economy is about, in 2020, in the midst of the pandemic, Claudia founded Comunidad Latin America UK in the hope of supporting Latin American communities in the UK at a time of the worst global health crisis to ensure those who did not speak English were not further socially disadvantaged.
Comunidad Latin America UK advocates for sharing of knowledge that can lift communities up and improve their socio economic opportunities and future prospects, from registering to vote, applying and securing housing, improving credit rating, learning about pensions, renters rights and access to health and education. To date there have been four events held gathering close to two thousand people in attendance (in person and online) and has joined forces with organisations from across the UK such as No Child Left Behind, Doctors of the World, Positive East, Migrant Democracy Project, Chagas Hub, LAWA, IWGB trade union, Unison, Money Hub Hackney, Hackney Council and more.
The Therapy and Social Change (TaSC) Network is a broad affiliation of people interested in exploring the interface between therapeutic ideas and practices and social justice perspectives and actions. We are interested both in the ways that counselling and psychotherapy can be practiced with social justice concerns in mind (for instance, tackling unconscious biases in the consulting room), and also in the ways that therapeutic principles and practices can be extended out to the wider social realm (for instance, developing social and emotional literacy in schools).
