Community Health Worker Training Program - Community Health Worker Talent Pipeline Initiative, LaGuardia Community College 29-10 Thomson Avenue, Long Island City, NY 11101 Hannah Weinstock, 718-482-5285 hweinstock@lagcc.cuny.edu www.laguardia.edu Grant Program Funds Requested: $2,992,528.86 Requesting funding preference LaGuardia Community College (LaGuardia) proposes the Community Health Worker (CHW) Talent Pipeline Initiative to: • Expand the public health workforce by training communities facing health disparities to serve as community health workers • Strengthen the skills of current community health workers so that they can more effectively serve their communities. This approach is grounded in the evidence-based assumption that training communities facing health disparities to serve as community health workers will foster economic mobility, increase access to care and quality of care, and help close health disparities. LaGuardia will recruit low-income, unemployed and underemployed New Yorkers for CHW training and employment, with a focus on the following three populations experiencing health disparities: • Public housing residents • Immigrants with limited English proficiency • Communities of color in NYC’s highest-poverty neighborhoods This will be accomplished through partnerships with the following three organizations: • NYC Housing Authority Resident Economic Empowerment & Sustainability (NYCHA REES) will help to recruit public housing residents for all four training tracks. • Commonpoint Queens (CPQ) will help to recruit English language learners and to offer contextualized English language bridge instruction simultaneous to the CHW training. • 1199SEIU Training and Employment Funds (1199) will sponsor the CHW registered apprenticeship, manage the relationship with the apprenticeship employer, and train incumbent workers. Over the course of three years, LaGuardia will train 255 students, including 195 job-seekers and 60 incumbent workers, across four different training tracks: Track A: Standard CHW Training and Internship Program Track B: CHW for English Language Learners Training and Internship Program Track C: CHW Registered Apprenticeship Program Track D: CHW Incumbent Worker Training LaGuardia’s CHW Training curriculum includes four classes, delivered over 200 hours of instruction: Foundations of Community Health Work, Public Health, Health & Wellness, and Technology for Community Health. Topics include motivational interviewing, active listening, inter-person and communication skills, inter-disciplinary teams, outreach and engagement, advocacy, service coordination, healthcare and social service systems, health insurance, cultural competence, racism, social determinants of health, population health, chronic diseases, infectious diseases, mental health, substance use, diet, exercise, sexuality, Microsoft Office suite, telehealth, electronic health records, and more. The courses carry nine credits for those continuing on to college at LaGuardia. Incumbent worker training will focus on technology skills, emergency preparedness, and vaccine hesitancy, as well as other specialty topics developed based on employer feedback. HRSA organizational priorities in telehealth and behavioral health will feature prominently in the curriculum and field experiences. Students will receive stipends to allow them to dedicate time to training and internships as well as educational case management to connect to other resources on campus and beyond. Over 90% of students are expected to complete training, with 100% of training completers in the job-seeker cohorts completing internships or apprenticeships at one of several dozen internship and apprenticeship partner organizations. In these field experiences, students will work on inter-professional teams engaging under-served communities. Following their field experiences, over 75% of graduates are expected to secure employment in a CHW-related job or begin a public-health related college degree.
