Local Hispanic leader empowers Baltimore youth to prevent intimate partner violence

A local Hispanic leader is helping to empower Baltimore students to deal with intimate partner violence by educating them and their parents about how to prevent such assaults. 

On a Wednesday evening during Pikesville Middle School's Hispanic Heritage Month celebration, Monica Guerrero Vazquez talked with parents and students about a heavy topic: gender-based and intimate partner violence.

It's not an easy conversation to have. But for Guerrero Vazquez, breaking the stigma and talking with young people about it is key to prevention.

As a survivor of gender-based and intimate partner violence, she noticed many organizations focus on intervention, which she says is important, but she couldn't find many groups working on prevention.

In 2023, she brought together a group of friends interested in prevention, with a focus on Hispanic and Latino communities, and that's how TAMOJA Foundation was born. The organization's name is a combination of the first two letters of her and her siblings' first names.

"It was really an inner reflection of how I can make a change for young people and their communities. Because if we endure violence all of our lives or if we witness violence all of our lives and there's no healing, the prevention is never going to work, so that's why I work on the prevention through the healing journey," said TAMOJA Foundation President and CEO Monica Guerrero Vazquez.

About 1 in 3 women have experienced partner violence

Nearly 1 in 3 women globally have experienced partner or sexual violence during their lifetime, according to the World Health Organization.

She said data and evidence from her partners in the Baltimore area show how important prevention work is, which makes her feel hopeful and motivated to do the work with her foundation every day.

By day, Guerrero Vazquez is a suicide prevention researcher and the executive director of the Center for Health and Opportunity for Latinos at Johns Hopkins. "Gender-based and intimate partner violence is a human rights issue and we need to pay more attention to the signs, to the prevention," she said.

TAMOJA Foundation focuses on three pillars: awareness, education and empowerment.

"In the awareness, I'm trying to break stigma, and the education is giving communities tools to understand and have the conversation, and the empowerment will not happen if we don't do work with young people," said Guerrero Vazquez.

Event at Pikesbille Middle School

Guerrero Vazquez and her community liaison, Xochitl Lopez, set up a booth in Pikesville Middle School's cafeteria and brought prevention information to hand out in English and in Spanish.

The number of students who speak English as a second language has grown in the past couple of years. Principal Nicole Bridges said Pikesville Middle School became a community school a few years ago and at the same time it also became an ESOL (English for Speakers of Other Languages) school.

"It brought it to our attention, like, hey, we're not just the one and two community anymore; we are growing vastly and we need to pause and make sure that we recognize all the students," said Principal Bridges.

The Hispanic Heritage Month event at the school drew a large crowd.

"Being an educator is not easy. But one of the things that I'll be quick to humble myself to say is it takes a community, so any chance I get to bring the community together so we can figure out how we can accomplish this task of really growing our kids, I'm all for bringing us together," said Bridges.

It's why groups like TAMOJA Foundation were invited. "It was a great opportunity to partner with them and have them come and celebrate us and actually give out the information and the resources," said Bridges.

Guerrero Vazquez is hoping to expand the foundation's reach by working more closely with schools. "The roles that schools have as these spaces for breaking stigma and educating and connecting with young people is a cornerstone to any prevention work that we want to do around violence," said Guerrero Vazquez.

Hispanic Leadership Award

Guerrero Vazquez is being honored this month with a 2026 Maryland Hispanic Leadership Award from The Daily Record and The Maryland Hispanic Chamber of Commerce.

"It is an honor to be recognized for the work that I don't do alone," she said. "TAMOJA has a board of directors, has volunteers, has participants, so being part of a space where not only the work of TAMOJA, but the work of the prevention of gender based and intimate partner violence is recognized is critical to do our work and to work more on the prevention and of our mission."

She's one of six nonprofit leaders being honored for her professional accomplishment, community involvement and commitment to mentoring. Grassroots Crisis Intervention Executive Director Mariana Izraelson is another honoree.

The awards honor Hispanic leaders across six categories: business, law, government, nonprofits, health care and higher education.

Leadership academy

This year, TAMOJA launched its leadership academy, which trains 14 individuals – seven adults and seven teenagers – on breaking stigma, healing pathways and trauma-informed prevention.

It's an 18-month multigenerational pilot program that focuses on unlearning for the adults and learning for the teens. The participants meet monthly in person, but also do webinars and have office hours and receive a stipend.

Guerrero Vazquez said that while the program teaches the participants, she's also learning from them too and the goal is for them to become future advocates for prevention.

"We are looking for opportunities to expand our work, to sustain our work and to train the next generation of advocates and preventionists," said Guerrero Vazquez.

Guerrero Vazquez hopes that after they graduate, they can be a part of the change, helping grow the message of prevention, but also help sustain the work through engaging other cohorts of the leadership academy.

"The prevention doesn't start in the victim; the prevention starts in recognizing the signs before the violence happens," Guerrero Vazquez.

If a young person feels uncomfortable in any relationship, she wants them not to be afraid to ask for help.