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APHA Scientific Session and Event Listing

Darouny Somsanith, MPH, Community Voices Project, Alameda Health Consortium, 1320 Harbor Bay Parkway, Suite 250, Alameda, CA 94502, (510) 769-2244, darounys@alamedahealthconsortium.org

Our project, Community Voices-Oakland, proposes to put together a poster presentation that highlights the community organizing work of our bi-lingual and bi-cultural CHWs at two community health centers (Asian Health Services and La Clínica de La Raza) in Oakland, California. These CHWs advocate for public health on a daily basis by providing outreach and in-reach to our patients to ensure that they can access health care regardless of insurance, language or immigration status. In addition, they also work tirelessly to build our communities capacity to advocate on their own behalf through their community work. Our presentation will focus on their work within the context of the social mission of the health centers, which started during the civil rights movement and have at their core a human rights framework of care.

We will be bringing two CHWs to highlight the innovative work that they are doing to build community capacity and increase civic participation amongst our limited English proficient patients. These models include our work with Promotores in the Latino community, which includes both males and females, and our patient leadership groups within the Chinese, Vietnamese, and Korean communities. These programs are innovative because they are working with hard to reach and evolving populations (e.g. men and immigrants) and cover topics beyond health (e.g. worker's rights and anti-immigration legislation). Despite lack of stable funding for enabling services, the health centers support these innovative models because they are the only ones who are experts at knowing what is best for their communities.

Learning Objectives: At the conclusion of the session, the participant (learner) in this session will be able to

• Articulate how community health centers and community health workers play a role in improving the health of low-income and uninsured communities in the U.S..
• Understand the advantages of a community health center’s social model of care versus a traditional medical model.
• Describe 3 examples of CHW models used to serve limited English speaking, immigrant communities.

Presenting author's disclosure statement:

Not Answered