Training/certification of Community Health Workers (CHWs) is a recent priority in the US. The current evolving need for educational credentials brings opportunities to define best approaches to meet the needs of these non-traditional learners. The objective of this program was to assemble a multi-sector, interdisciplinary coalition of collaborators from Illinois to co-create a culturally sensitive online training program for CHWs to become lifestyle coaches.

The formative phase of the project included a landscape analysis of existing training and interviews with 10 partners from public health organizations and community colleges. Next, we established the coalition with a diverse group of collaborators (i.e.,20 plus Illinois CHWs, allies, Extension officials, university researchers, and online learning specialists) to set the program’s priorities, focus, format, and components. Finally, 10 CHWs pilot-tested the training and participated in semi-structured interviews.

Initial assessment shed light on essential competencies for CHWs and emerging areas of interest intensified by the pandemic, including wellness training, online offerings, and access to multi-cultural/language training. The co-creation of the training took over 200 hours of meetings to complete tasks such as setting program focus and format, creating storytelling, lessons, interactivities, branching scenarios, translations, video and audio recordings. We conducted inductive analysis with interview data and identified 3 emerging themes: “Training & empowerment”; “The centrality of culture”; and “Walking-the-walk: self-care matters”.

Through our participatory approach we were able to balance interests, benefits, and responsibilities between collaborators, and make the development process inclusive and grounded in the everyday priorities of CHWs and the communities they serve.