Welcome
Welcome to this Community Health Worker 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 community health service 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 has been to share "Promising Practices" and to invite and listen to the important voice of community health workers, themselves, as we identified, tested and validated promising approaches for institutions of higher education to be truly responsive to the educational needs and interests of the workers, themselves, and the employers of community health workers.
The importance of this work has become very high on the national agenda of health and human services. There is now wide agreement regarding 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 culturally and linguistically distinct communities. They are also well known for reaching socioeconomically disadvantaged populations in resource-poor neighborhoods, where they are helping communities to develop their assets and helping the nation to address health disparities in both urban and rural settings.
On this website you can find the Community Health Worker National Education Collaborative project’s lessons learned guidebook entitled: Key considerations for opening doors: developing community health worker education programs. We hope this guidebook and the other resources found here serve the interests of administrators, program coordinators, faculty, instructors, preceptors, mentors, CHWs and CHW employers well in the continuing development and delivery of quality curricula and instruction for U.S. community health workers of all job titles and service-delivery types in all settings. We believe the key considerations delineated in this guidebook can support the continuing development of this workforce in a manner which is fully appropriate and responsive to the unique character and needs of CHWs everywhere.
Don Proulx and E. Lee Rosenthal, Co-Directors
Background
As the community health worker field has become more institutionalized in the U.S. health care system, training, which had 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 has been growing in response to these trends in the community health worker field.
Fifteen (15) adapting college sites were supported by a partnership of six (6) collaborating technical assistance universities/colleges/agencies, each of which brought a unique expertise to the CHW-NEC project. The project carried out from 2004-2008 offers “promising practice materials and methods” relating to college-supported curricula and continuing employment market development. This website now serves to communicate important lessons learned by the CHW National Education Collaborative. This collaborative included an expansive partnership of some 22 educational institutions, a cohort of expert ad visors, and a national advisory council of 10 CHW leaders and 5 CHW program-related people.
The project used 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 were identified in the boxes of the logic model which had some 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
The evaluation plan was 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 of the evaluation were both formative and summative. Formative objectives were intended to monitor progress and determine whether the project was delivered as intended. These objectives related to monitoring both the delivery of the National Community of Practice Workshop and the mentoring of adapting institutions by technical assistance institutions. Summative objectives assessed the extent by which the project had its intended effects on the program participants, whether program participants received the promising practices most germane to the context in which they operate, and whether these institutions increased their capacity as evidenced by their ability to deliver a responsive curriculum for community health workers.
