Our Path with Community Health Workers

We are excited to share the various paths we have taken in supporting Community Health Workers (CHW) .  In 2024 we completed the CHW Academy for Supervising Providers for CalOptima Health which was a six-month training program for 21 contracted providers that helped build their capacity to provide CHW services.  We were asked to design and coordinate the training after leading a couple of co-design sessions with the community that helped inform CalOptima Health’s strategy for launching the CHW Medi-Cal benefit.  The first co-design session helped identify key themes to consider for implementation including sustainability, workforce development, population level needs, infrastructure development, measuring impact, and systems change.  The second co-design session helped identify capacity building priorities which helped in designing the CHW Academy.  Over 100 individuals participated in the sessions delivered by a group of expert instructors that we brought together to deliver the training.

We are now continuing to partner with Coast Community College District in their Community Health Worker (CHW) efforts, building on the Healthcare Everywhere: The Rise of Community Health Workers conference in 2023 that we were hired to organize, the CHW Pathways initiative helps take this work a step further to support building out an ecosystem across the colleges and in the community.   Also, we are happy to be included as one of the consultants in the Amplifying Impact Initiative with the California Healthcare Foundation to support organizations across the state looking to scale their CHW efforts.  Our journey in this work began many years ago in launching CHW programs and even before the CHW benefit was launched in July 1, 2022 we were inquiring with CalOptima Health about their vision for championing these efforts.  As the state is taking steps to work on the certification process, we are committed to staying on this journey to ensure that our future pathway is informed by the voice of the community and we are helping to support the impact of community health workers.