Yurilka Hernandez Founder, Psychotherapy & Consultation Group Services PLC

Yurilka Hernandez / Garrett Shaw

Yurilka Hernandez has a lot on her plate.

She’s the founder of Psychotherapy & Consultation Group Services, a mental health clinic serving English, Spanish, Portuguese and French-speaking clients in New York, Florida and Massachusetts. She’s also the secretary and compliance officer of the Latino Social Work Coalition and Scholarship Fund, which supports Latino and bilingual social workers and mental health professionals.

Providing mentorship to younger social workers and linguistically inclusive services are top priorities. At the Latino Social Work Coalition and Scholarship Fund, she closes educational gaps for social work students. Her multilingual clinic was born out of a need for affordable, bilingual therapists in her home of the Bronx. She also worked at Acacia Network, a major Hispanic-led human services nonprofit, developing bilingual programs for underserved communities.

“Knowing that the programs that I helped develop are going to be serving a very targeted population that is much needed, it creates tremendous joy for me,” she says.

Hernandez is driven by the desire to help others. She explained that at the outset of her career, she wanted to change the world – but has come to realize that it’s actually about changing just one person’s life for the better.

“One of my biggest motivations,” she says, “is knowing that the people that I’ve worked with, the people that I mentor, are going to go into the spaces and create beautiful things, not only for themselves for career purposes, but for the population that we serve.”

– A.S.