Supporting community health workers in New Orleans and beyond: Expansion of the Louisiana Community Health Outreach Network

Community health worker (CHW) associations can be an important resource for professional support, but many areas of the country do not yet have such groups.  In this interactive session, CHWs and an academic partner who collaborated on this abstract will outline how a group of New Orleans-based CHWs came together to establish and expand the Louisiana Community Health Outreach Network (LACHON). We will highlight successes and lessons learned for conducting outreach to engage CHWs with various job titles, hosting annual conferences, using our listserv as reliable source of community information, conducting professional development seminars, creating a mentoring program for new CHWs, supporting development of CHW training, and co-leading  a new community-based participatory research project.  Most importantly, we will describe how this model of CHW professional development can be replicated in other areas.