Welcome
Welcome to this Community Health Workers' National Education Collaborative (CHW-NEC) website. We hope you will find important information here and the connections you need to assist in your development of CHW educational resources, services, curricula, and promising practice delivery strategies which are particularly responsive to these important members of the nation's health and human services delivery team.
It is with great enthusiasm that we established this "National Community of Practice" website to support the development of "college responsive programs" for community health workers all across the country. The emphasis of our work through the support of a grant from the U. S. Department of Education's Fund for the Improvement of Postsecondary Education is to share "Promising Practices" and to invite and listen to the important voice of community health workers, themselves, as we identify, test and validate promising approaches for institutions of higher education to be truly responsive to the educational need and interests of both the workers, themselves, and the employers of community health workers.
The importance of this is now very high on the national agenda of health and human services. There is a need to agree upon the unique competence and contribution that these workers bring to the health and human services team. Community health workers are culturally and linguistically competent members of the nation’s public health and health care delivery workforce. They are particularly effective in reaching minority and socio-economically disadvantaged populations in resource-poor neighborhoods, where they are helping the nation address health disparities in both urban and rural settings.
Don Proulx and Lee Rosenthal, Co-Directors
Background
As the community health worker field is becoming more institutionalized in the U.S. health care system, training, which has been primarily provided on-the-job, is becoming more heavily scrutinized. Furthermore, there is a growing interest in standardizing and streamlining educational efforts to take the burden off individual employment-based or community project-based programs. College-supported and competency-based education can respond to these trends in the community health worker field.
Fifteen (15) adapting college sites are being supported by a partnership of six (6) collaborating technical assistance universities/colleges/agencies, each of which bring a unique expertise to the project. The project brings “promising practice materials and methods” relating to college-supported curricula, core competency assessment, employment market development, and lessons learned by the technical assistance partners for the adapting institutions. The project uses a logic model as the framework for identifying and targeting the root causes or antecedent conditions affecting the development of a national community of practice for the educational preparation of community health workers. The kick start for this project was a National Community of Practice Invitational Workshop hosted by the University of Arizona in Tucson in June of 2005. Key topics for that National Workshop included, but were not limited to the following:
- Students New to Higher Education
- Navigational Skills for Non-Traditional Students
- Community Health Worker Employment Market Assessment Strategies
- Community Health Worker Core Competencies Defined
- College Credit by Assessment/Credit for Prior Leaning and Experience
- Literacy, Language, and Cultural Diversity in Higher Education
- Community Health Worker Credentialing Issues
Project Design
The logic model on program design depicts those antecedent conditions for which expert resource materials and methodologies have already been developed by technical assistance institutions. Technical assistance institutions are identified in those boxes of the logic model, where they have the expertise, lessons learned, materials, or methodologies to share with adapting institutions. In addition to serving as an organizational tool (coordinating materials and methods among institutions) and a strategic planning tool (pairing technical assistance institutions with adapting institutions) this framework was also used to guide the delivery of a National Community of Practice Invitational Workshop.
Click here to download an Adobe Acrobat version of the logic model.
Evaluation
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The evaluation plan is designed with four clear goals:
- providing available promising practice materials,
- using these materials to develop curriculum plans for adapting institutions,
- implementing these plans, and then
- disseminating the lessons learned from engaging in this process.
The objectives are both, formative and summative. Formative objectives are intended to monitor progress and determine whether the project is delivered as intended. These objectives relate to monitoring both the delivery of the National Community of Practice Workshop and the mentoring of adapting institutions by technical assistance institutions. Summative objectives assess the extent to which the project has its intended effects on the program participants, whether program participants receive the promising practices most germane to the context in which they operate, and whether these institutions increase their capacity as evidenced by their ability to deliver a responsive curriculum for community health workers.
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