The Mental Health Outreach for MotherS (MOMS) Partnership® was represented on a national stage at Yale on May 2, 2025, as findings from a newly piloted stress management course were presented at the 6th annual Women’s Mental Health Conference. Developed at Yale Child Study Center, the MOMS Partnership® is a culturally responsive, community-based program model implemented and adapted at several sites throughout the United States.

The Charles B. Wang Community Health Center (CBWCHC) is one such site, where the CBW MOMS Partnership team provides services to international and U.S.-born mothers and women raising children of Chinese descent in New York City. Two members of this team, Di Ai, LCSW, and Chengyu Yang, shared findings and lessons from three pilot rounds of the MOMS Stress Management Course, culturally tailored to meet the needs of Asian-identifying mothers navigating stress and parenting in both Mandarin and English.

Yale’s Women’s Mental Health Conference is the first academic and trainee-led conference in the nation dedicated exclusively to women’s mental health. The event draws experts, advocates and trainees from across the country, aiming to expand clinical knowledge and uplift the voices of women’s mental health professionals to build a lasting movement for change. This year’s conference centered around three goals: screening and managing mental health concerns, celebrating contributions to the field, and creating community. Visit the conference website to read the goals in full, as well as to learn more about the event.

This year’s conference was filled with dynamic workshops and presentations exploring themes like reproductive mental health, perinatal mood disorders, boundary setting in clinical care, and the impact of intergenerational trauma. The keynote speaker, renowned psychologist Mariel Buqué, PhD, offered powerful insights on how trauma is passed across generations—and what can be done to break that cycle.

Ai and Yang’s talk, titled “Reflections on the Delivery of a Culturally Adapted Stress Management Course for Mandarin- and English-Speaking, Asian-Identifying Mothers,” centered around three topics. The first included reflections on cultural adjustments that take place during program delivery — after program manuals have been culturally adapted. The second focused on similarities and differences in the strategies used by program facilitators to engage mothers in two different cultural groups; and the third focused on observations of similarities and differences in the ways mothers in two different cultural groups have responded. The latter included information about the differences in the stressors experienced by mothers in each group, participant engagement level, and engagement strategies used.