Blog: Q&A: Building the Resilience of Young Children in West and South LA through Culturally Tailored Mental Health Services

Since 1946, National Mental Health Awareness Month has been observed each May in the United States. To shed light on innovative, community-centered approaches to caring for the mental health and well-being of LA County’s youngest children, the Partnership is excited to share three deep dive interviews with leading early childhood service providers.

Read on for an interview with Tim Sweeney, Executive Director of WIN, diving into how culturally-tailored mental health services grounded in the importance of strong interpersonal relationships are helping kids in West and South LA flourish

And, don’t miss the other interviews in this series on the intersection of young children’s mental health and the ongoing immigration crisis with Para Los Niños and a unique program building the capacity of child care providers to offer trauma-informed care with CCALA.

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Please tell us about WIN’s mission and your role within the organization.

WIN’s mission is to empower families with young children to build resilience and thrive by strengthening relationships within families and communities. Every word is intentional – at the core of WIN’s work is a fundamental belief that relationships are the foundation of child and family well-being.

I’ve been with the organization for six years, evolving from a program-side role into Executive Director. In that capacity, I oversee strategic direction, financial health, and fundraising, while supporting the staff who lead WIN’s operations and programmatic work day-to-day.

Many people think of mental health as something only relevant for older kids or adults, and a lot of advocacy during National Mental Health Awareness Month focuses on these groups. What do you want every parent, pediatrician, and policymaker in LA to understand about why the first five years are so critical?

The early years matter for brain development. That’s well established. But what often gets lost in the academic framing is the social and emotional growth happening in those years that is so consequential.

In those early months and years, babies are reading every signal from the adults around them – asking, in their own way, is this a safe place? The answers they receive shape how they relate to others for the rest of their lives, from childhood friendships to adult relationships in the workplace and beyond.

Adverse childhood experiences compound this. And while the landmark ACEs study is widely cited, it didn’t fully account for the trauma of racism, poverty, and community violence – all of which are daily realities for many of the families WIN serves. What buffers children against all of these is the strength of their early relationships. Secure, responsive caregiving builds a core resilience that doesn’t just address a single hardship; it equips children to navigate adversity throughout their lives, and helps interrupt cycles of intergenerational trauma. Those early foundational relationships are what carry people through.

As of this year, WIN has been doing in-home mental health therapy for 20 years  (congratulations!), and your outcome data is striking: 87% of children you reach show increased secure attachment, and 100% of parents receiving therapy show a decrease in depression. What does it take to achieve those results consistently?

Three things that come to mind that point to what makes WIN’s model so effective.

Number one is having staff who are trained and grounded in this work. Even experienced therapists rarely arrive with a grounding in early childhood and relational health, so WIN invests heavily in building that foundation. Central to that is Child-Parent Psychotherapy, a dyadic therapy model developed by Alicia Lieberman that treats the parent-child relationship itself as a unit of care, addressing trauma carried by the caregiver, the child, or both.

Second, is our commitment to meeting families where they are – literally. The vast majority of WIN’s services happen in families’ homes or in the community, not in a clinic. That removes barriers around transportation and scheduling, but also meaningfully reduces the stigma around seeking mental health support. WIN has also developed group models for families who aren’t ready for or interested in traditional therapy, expanding access through multiple modalities.

And the third thing is time. Because WIN relies primarily on private funding, we aren’t bound by the rigid session limits that constrain most publicly funded services. Families can stay in services for as long as they need – and the outcomes data bear that out. Families in services for 12 months or more show significantly stronger results on measures like parental stress reduction and secure child attachment (20 to 30 percentage points higher than shorter-term engagement). Not every family needs that level of support, but for those who do, the difference is profound.

Which communities in LA are most underserved when it comes to early childhood mental health, and what are the biggest barriers to access in this current moment?

Reaching underserved communities in West and South LA,  including immigrant families, requires more than good clinical practice – it requires trust, and trust is built through proximity. A significant majority of WIN’s staff speak Spanish, all services are offered in both English and Spanish, and staff are intentionally hired from the communities they serve. When providers look like the families they’re working with and share lived experience, it makes a meaningful difference – especially for communities with deep, understandable distrust of public institutions.

WIN also gives families real choices: therapy, group support, or drop-in spaces, depending on what feels right. And underpinning all of it is a pairing of therapy with case management. WIN’s Community Resource Specialists help families navigate food access, rental assistance, and connections to other services because families carrying significant material stress can’t do the deeper relational work if their basic needs aren’t being addressed. Meeting people where they are means meeting the whole person, not just the clinical presenting issue.

We also regularly show up at community events, resource fairs, baby showers, and partner events – and sometimes simply go to parks and neighborhood spaces to have conversations, connect people to resources, and make WIN’s services known. During the pandemic, additional funding allowed for expanded outreach, but community presence has always been a constant. 

Please share a moment — without identifying anyone — that reminded you why this work matters?

I was speaking to our intake coordinator recently, and she told me the story of a young woman who had been raised in the foster care system and was now pregnant with her first child. She said: I grew up in the system. I moved from place to place, didn’t have stability, didn’t really have a parent. I don’t know how to do this. I don’t have a model.

It’s a moment that captures something central to WIN’s work. For families without a village or a support network – no aunties, no parents, no friends who’ve been through it — WIN tries to fill some of that space. Especially in the prenatal period, that means slowing down with families and asking intentional questions: What do you want for your child? What do you want that relationship to look like?

Because all of us carry things we don’t want to pass on. Helping families understand the patterns of intergenerational trauma and naming them before a child arrives is one of the most powerful things WIN can do. Not to dwell in the difficulty, but to look forward: toward the relationship a parent wants to build, and to walk alongside them as they work toward it.

What gives you hope right now? And, what message do you have for philanthropic and government partners about opportunities they have to help improve the mental health and well-being of LA’s youngest children and their families?

Two things in particular give me hope on a day-to-day basis. The first is our staff – their commitment, resilience, and passion for doing this work the right way, even when it’s hard. The second is the stories. WIN collects qualitative data alongside its numbers, and what comes back from families is profound: parents who didn’t know how to do this – who didn’t know how to be a parent – and found their footing through WIN’s support. Another story that stays with me is of a parent who had real distance with their child, and through the work, became the person that child now turns to for safety and comfort. That shift doesn’t just change a relationship today – it changes how that relationship functions for decades.

I urge funders and policymakers not to lose sight of upstream, preventative services. Funding has increasingly shifted toward crisis response, including homeless services and emergency interventions. And, while those needs are real, that shift has come at the expense of the preventative work that makes communities more whole and more resilient over time. The return on investing early is enormous. 

In addition to the Q&A above, over the course of our conversation, Tim shared information about several innovative relational therapy services that WIN is newly implementing and excited to scale.

WIN has expanded beyond traditional therapy to offer group-based models that do much of the same relational work in a more accessible format. One is “Attachment Vitamins,” a ten-week group developed by the same team behind Child-Parent Psychotherapy, focused on trauma, child development, and strengthening the parent-child bond.

Another is “Talk, Touch, and Listen While Combing Hair.” Developed specifically for Black families, the program takes the hair combing routine – something culturally specific, already present in family life – and elevates it into a space for connection, storytelling, attunement, and healing. It’s the same relational work WIN has always done, but grounded in something real and familiar rather than something that can feel clinical or disconnected.

Critically, the program includes resources to talk explicitly about racism and colorism. In a moment when families are navigating discrimination, violence, and the daily weight of being Black and brown in America, having tools to name those experiences – and help families understand them as systemic rather than personal failures – matters enormously. WIN recently completed a pilot and is eager to expand access to as many families as possible, including by adapting components of the program for Latine families affected by the recent immigration raids.