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Arnold School of Public Health

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Center for Community Health Alignment to lead nationwide public health capacity-building efforts with new cooperative agreement

January 28, 2025 | Erin Bluvas, bluvase@sc.edu

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) has awarded $1 million to the envision program at the Arnold School’s Center for Community Health Alignment (CCHA). They will use the grant, which is renewable at $200,000 annually for five years, to strengthen the community health worker (CHW) workforce nationwide and the ability of other entities to partner with CHWs.

“The envision team at USC, together with our envision partners, will be providing technical assistance and training to CHW organizations and to organizations developing CHW programs to implement best practices and strategies of the CHW workforce,” says Julie Smithwick, executive director for CCHA. “Our goal is to offer consultation and ongoing guidance that helps these organizations employ community health workers effectively as they work to address social drivers of health and promote greater health equity.”

As a collaboration of CHWs and allies, envision provides training and technical assistance to community-based organizations, localities, territories, tribes, tribal organizations, and urban Indian health organizations. CCHA helped establish the national partnership* in 2021 to further the effective growth of community health workers and in 2022, the partnership received a $2.3 million cooperative agreement for the Envision Equitable Healthy Communities project that they used to aid communities most impacted by COVID-19*. 

This funding comes at a critical time. It will allow us to continue our work supporting public health, health care and community based organizations in implementing community health worker programs, integrating them into existing care teams, collecting and analyzing health care and public health data to inform program development, evaluate the programs, and assist diverse partners in understanding the roles of and how to partner with CHWs.

Lisa Renee Holderby-Fox, executive director for envision

This latest funding will extend and expand this work to build on the progress of the past three years. Working with many of the same partners**, the six-person CCHA-envision team will lead this new initiative under the direction of envision executive director Lisa Renee Holderby-Fox.

“This funding comes at a critical time,” Holderby-Fox says. “It will allow us to continue our work supporting public health, health care and community based organizations in implementing community health worker programs, integrating them into existing care teams, collecting and analyzing health care and public health data to inform program development, evaluate the programs, and assist diverse partners in understanding the roles of and how to partner with CHWs.”

In particular, the project will focus on addressing social drivers of health to promote health equity. The community health worker workforce already been proven to be an effective strategy for improving the health of communities at the grassroots level. These public health professionals are typically members of the areas they serve and are vetted at the local level as trusted resources. The training and support they receive related to disease prevention, intervention, service coordination, and cultural competence makes them particularly well-suited to removing barriers to advancing health equity.

This cooperative agreement is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totaling $200,000 with 100 percent funded by CDC/HHS. The contents are those of the authors and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement, by CDC/HHS, or the U.S. Government.

*CCHA’s Envision Equitable Healthy Communities partners include Mobilizing Action Toward Community Health (MATCH), University of Wisconsin Population Health Institute School of Medicine and Public Health; Louisiana State University Health (LSU Health); Wisconsin Department of Health Services, Division of Public Health, Chronic Disease Prevention Unit; and Care Coordination Systems (CCS) and Kinetic Health.

**Members of the new CDC partnership include the Arnold School of Public Health Center for Community Health Alignment (CCHA), Wisconsin Department of Health Services, MATCH, Community Health Worker Institute at Louisiana State University Health in New Orleans, and Kinetic Health.


 

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