SA国际传媒

By Clara Helm

Left: Professor Juan Velasco Moreno, Ruby Gutierrez ’25, and Michelle Hernandez-Garduza ’26. Right: Professor Juan Velasco Moreno, Jimena Porras Martinez Pita ’28, Julia Von Gersdorff ’25.

Professor Velasco-Moreno of the English Department has launched a new and deeply meaningful initiative: a YouTube channel called dedicated to poetry and meditation in Spanish. Originally created as a creative and reflective space for his nonprofit, , the channel has quickly gained attention beyond the original audience—reaching the U.S. prison system and communities in El Salvador.

The channel was born out of a personal observation: staff in Programa Velasco were struggling with stress and burnout. “There seemed to be some conflicts in the team,” he explained. “It’s sort of like this stress that we accumulated during COVID. And now it's acting out in the way we feel…something was missing.” This realization led him to create meditative videos, ranging from five to twelve minutes, that reach hundreds of people. A mix of meditation practice and poetry reading, Velasco-Moreno’s narration over picturesque backgrounds encourages viewers to live consciously, to reconnect with an inner peace, and to ask questions that will bring calm and clarity.

Underlying the project is a deep understanding of trauma and healing. “A lot of people were traumatized during COVID and don’t even know it,” Professor Velasco-Moreno said. “We live in a constant state of reactivity, and that’s part of trauma.” Through guided breathing, mindfulness, and creative writing, the channel offers a path away from reaction and toward reflection.

Buddhist Prison Ministry, a US organization that offers Buddhist tools and skills to the incarcerated through their workbooks and resources, discovered the channel. The ministry, which has worked for years with inmates across the country, reached out with a request that reshaped the trajectory of the channel. They asked Velasco-Moreno to help them provide Spanish-language content to reach an estimated 45,000 Latinx inmates in the U.S. prison system.

“They have been wanting to increase their materials in Spanish,” said Velasco-Moreno. “They wanted someone who could create authentic, culturally relevant, and spiritually grounded materials.” As a certified Zen Buddhist teacher, poet, and educator with deep roots in Latinx literature and social justice, he was uniquely positioned for the task.

Crucially, this initiative has grown into a collaborative project involving SA国际传媒 students, including some from the English Department. Three bilingual English majors – Julia von Gersdoff ’25, Ruby Gutierrez ’25, and Michelle Hernandez-Garduza ’26 – are helping to shape the written components of the course materials. Julia, a creative writer, is transcribing the videos into poetic Spanish texts. “I told her, ‘Listen to the guided meditations and think of them as if you were writing poems,’” said Velasco-Moreno. “It makes them more readable and more emotionally resonant.”

Ruby, a peer educator in Velasco-Moreno’s “English 73: Life Writing” class, is developing reflective questions to accompany each video. These prompts encourage incarcerated individuals to explore themes such as peace, trauma, and identity, mirroring exercises used in Velasco-Moreno’s popular course.

“Life writing is almost like a meditation about your journey,” he explained. “Who you are, who you want to be.” The goal is to empower incarcerated individuals to reflect and write about their lives, building both emotional resilience and writing skills.

Jimena Porras Martinez Pita ‘28, a double major in mathematics and philosophy, brings a unique interdisciplinary lens to the project. Fluent in both Spanish and English, she is contributing her bilingual skills to the transcription of meditation videos, ensuring the language is both accessible and resonant for Spanish-speaking audiences. In addition to her transcription work, Jimena is actively involved in shaping the outreach and marketing strategy for the channel—an effort that seeks to broaden the project’s impact among underserved communities, including but not limited to the U.S. prison system. Drawing on her analytical training in mathematics and the ethical grounding of her philosophy studies, she is helping the team think critically and creatively about how to scale the project responsibly and meaningfully.

One of the most compelling aspects of the project is its accessibility: though incarcerated individuals don’t have access to YouTube, the Buddhist Prison Ministry will upload all videos and accompanying materials into the prison system during an annual intake period. “In September, whatever we have ready, it’ll be uploaded,” Velasco-Moreno said. People in prison will then be able to view the meditations and respond in writing, some of which may even be mailed back to the ministry, sparking correspondence and community.

Professor Velasco-Moreno believes SA国际传媒 offers a uniquely fertile ground for this kind of high-impact work. “[My graduate program at] UCLA gave me great training,” he noted, “but SA国际传媒 gives you something more—it looks at the whole person. It’s about helping students thrive as people, not just as professionals.”

As a member of the Ignatian Faculty Forum, he draws inspiration from the Jesuit tradition of contemplative practice and holistic education. “There’s a beautiful alignment here between mind, body, and spirit,” he said. “And that makes this the perfect place to launch a project that combines spirituality, social justice, and creative expression.”

The initiative also reflects a growing desire among SA国际传媒 students to engage in meaningful work that integrates cultural awareness, writing, and social change. Many of the students involved have also taken Professor Velasco-Moreno’s Latinx literature courses, which offer historical and cultural context for the very communities this project aims to serve.

“This is a new opportunity to intervene directly,” he said. “To empower people who have been left out of most conversations. And to do it through creativity, reflection, and love.”

In the future, if given more funding for the project, Velasco-Moreno would seek to work with other departments at SA国际传媒 such as the religious studies and psychology departments, hoping to expand on the fundamental aspects at play: mental health, cultural awareness, and spiritual practices.