Luminarias Institute Inc. (LII) was founded by Los Angeles based psychologist, Dr. Jose Cardenas, after decades of work with underserved populations across the country and in his hometown of San Fernando.

Dr. Cardenas was one of eleven children born to immigrant parents who moved from Temastian, Jalisco, Mexico. They worked the fields and raised their family in the United Stated to offer their children an opportunity to higher education and prosperity through hard work and access to an education. The challenges of biculturalism, double standards and growing up in a family that suffered the traumatic loss of an older sibling only highlighted the need for access to mental health and psychoeducational resources for Latinx and other underserved populations.

Limitations to such resources included the lack of culturally competent practitioners, language barriers and social stigmas. With these challenges in mind, Dr. Cardenas committed himself to specialize in trauma providing bilingual and multicultural treatment as a clinical-community psychologist.  

After graduating and obtaining his license in clinical psychology, Dr. Cardenas developed and managed the largest school-based mental health clinic in the country in 1993. This was made possible by making use of therapy groups whenever possible. However, the school abandoned the group therapy program shortly after Dr. Cardenas left the organization to begin his private practice.

After years of working in private practice and supervising for other local entities, Dr. Cardenas started this nonprofit, in August of 2014. LII has since focused on treating individuals using multicultural and multilingual methods in order to maximize access to mental health services; delivering these services to underserved populations in the Northeast San Fernando Valley.