2006 POINT SCHOLARS

LeLaina Romero

Columbia University, Teachers College

Counseling Psychology

LeLaina is originally from Queens, New York, and then lived in Orlando, Florida for sixteen years. She is currently a doctoral student in Counseling Psychology at Teachers College, Columbia University. Her work has focused on the relationship between individual and societal well-being, beginning with a child abuse prevention project in Orlando, Florida. Her experiences as a multiracial queer woman from working-class roots continue to influence her desire to bridge activism with counseling. She is working with several colleagues to create counseling services in partnership with communities. The goal of this work is to implement a counseling model that goes beyond white middle-class heterosexual ideals. Informed by radical multicultural feminism and her own experiences with both privilege and marginalization, the core of LeLaina’s work is at the intersection of social identities. Particularly, she focuses on social class as an often unspoken but crucial aspect of our lives in a consumption-driven society. Her community of family and friends, though geographically scattered, has been vital to this ongoing work. She is connecting with others to create a sense of spiritual and emotional community in her current surroundings.

In LeLaina's own words: “If I see my identities as competing — being Latina and White, being bisexual, being a woman, being newly middle-class — then I am not a whole person. My personal growth and my work with others are about integration, about challenging painful ideologies that are invalidating when we do not hold identities that society values.”