green|spaces

With funding from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, NCHH has funded two rounds of Healthy Homes Workforce Development Mini-Grants, with applications open during late 2017 and spring 2018. These mini-grants help communities develop their workforce capacity to offer home-visiting services related to healthy homes, and to build a pool of trained community health workers (CHWs) trained in the healthy homes principles.
Since 2008, green|spaces has advanced the sustainability of living, working, and building in Chattanooga by providing education and training about best practices for healthy, high performance buildings. This year, green|spaces, along with the City of Chattanooga and EPB, the local power company, launched the Build It Green workforce development program focused on training at-risk young adults. Additionally, green|spaces undertook a feasibility study with the Green and Healthy Homes Initiative (GHHI) to implement a comprehensive asthma intervention, including healthy homes assessment and remediation, focused on addressing the areas with extremely high rates of asthma (those where 12.5% of children suffer from that condition). This feasibility study identified a shortage of a healthy homes workforce to provide home assessments and education.
As a current 2018 mini-grantee, green|spaces is addressing this shortage and providing healthy homes workforce training to three distinct groups: community health workers, energy auditors, and Build It Green workforce development program participants. Community health workers who are already working in the community will be trained to conduct healthy homes assessments utilizing one of the high quality national training programs that meet the needs of community members and the CHWs being trained. Second, energy auditors will be trained on how to identify home health hazards and recommend solutions that can be implemented during the construction phase of our program. This will allow the energy auditors to utilize the healthy homes training in all of the homes they assess for energy efficiency and educate them in referring any health issues, which usually cause deferral out of the energy efficiency programs, to programs that are able to address them. The training in the Build it Green Workforce Development Program will provide specific skills for identifying and addressing home health issues and exposing them to community health careers as potential opportunities after graduation from our program. Outreach materials will be provided in English and Spanish.