The novel coronavirus has added new anxieties and forms of grieving to the myriad practical and emotional burdens already present in the lives of underserved and uninsured immigrant families and communities. In this article, we relate our experiences since the COVID‐19 crisis to the lessons we have learned over time as mental health professionals working with families in no‐cost, student‐managed community comprehensive health clinics in academic‐community partnerships. We compare and contrast the learnings of flexibility of time, space, procedures, or attendance we acquired in this clinical community setting during regular times, with the new challenges families and therapists face, and the adaptations needed to continue to work with our clients in culturally responsive and empowering ways during the COVID‐19 pandemic. We describe families, students, professionals, promotoras (community links), and IT support staff joining together in solidarity as the creative problem solvers of new possibilities when families do not have access to Wi‐Fi, smartphones, or computers, or suffer overcrowding and lack of privacy. We describe many anxieties related to economic insecurity or fear of facing death alone, but also how to visualize expanding possibilities in styles of parenting or types of emotional support among family members as elements of hope that may endure beyond these unprecedented tragic times of loss and uncertainty.

The Witness to Witness Program (W2W), based on Weingarten’s witnessing model (2000, 2003, 2004), began in July 2018 and originally was established to support healthcare workers and attorneys (our partners) who were experiencing empathic distress working with people involved in various stages of the detention process. The W2W program evolved to offer four primary components: clinician listening sessions geared to deep understanding of the person’s story of their work and its challenges; an inventory of the person’s current internal and external resources both in the present and in the past; help with removal of barriers to those resources; and development of a personal toolkit to handle stress. Additional services available to partners and their organizations included psycho‐educational webinars, facilitated peer support groups, and organizational consultations to foster trauma‐sensitive and resilience‐hardy work environments. In March, after lockdowns due to the coronavirus pandemic, W2W pivoted to focus on handouts and webinars addressing how to cope with distress and moral injury, maintaining resilience, coping with grief, and dealing with multiple losses caused by the pandemic. Disaster sparked collaboration and innovation. A train the trainer model was developed to reach more community health workers providing services to the Latinx community dealing with losses similar to those experienced by the clients they serve. W2W continues to create virtual communities of support. In doing so we practice doing reasonable hope together (Weingarten, Family Process, 2010, 49, 5).

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