Minnesota Community Health Worker Alliance

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.
The Minnesota Community Health Worker Alliance (MCHWA) is a statewide nonprofit committed to equitable and optimal health outcomes for all communities. Its mission is to build systems and community capacity for better health through the integration of culturally responsive CHW strategies in healthcare, public health, behavioral health, oral health, and social services systems. Although Minnesota has standardized competency-based curriculum and Medicaid payment for diagnostic-related education and self-management services provided by CHW certificate holders, very few healthy housing providers have integrated CHWs into their teams.
As a mini-grantee, MCHWA offered an informational workshop and roundtable to familiarize healthy housing providers with CHWs’ roles and benefits, spotlight successful models, and explore opportunities and challenges to CHW integration. It also offered one training event for CHWs. The goals for these activities was to increase knowledge about CHW roles and benefits, better understand barriers and opportunities for CHW integration, and set key action steps.