Community health workers—frontline public health professionals who have a unique and trusted relationship with the communities they serve—have proven their ability to help create just, equitable, and thriving communities. As a community health worker for over a decade and an ally for over 35 years, we have never witnessed a time of greater interest and investment in this workforce. Amidst a rapidly changing community health worker funding landscape, the philanthropic community has an important role to play in assuring that community health workers are able to make an optimum contribution to communities and to the health system.

Despite more than 60 years of evidence for the efficacy of community health worker interventions in the US (Rodela et al. 2021), it took the COVID-19 pandemic to create broad awareness of the critical services community health workers provide to fill gaps in our precarious health care delivery systems. Between 2020 and 2022, federal funding through the American Rescue Plan Act and other mechanisms, along with local and regional philanthropy, allowed champions to start or expand community health worker programs that made life-saving services and resources available to communities hardest hit by the pandemic. Now, with the immediate crisis abated, many of the most significant funding streams for this workforce have ended and hundreds of community health workers who were hired during COVID-19 have been laid off.

Challenges for the Community Health Worker Profession

Community health workers in the US have seen this cycle of boom and bust before. They are often viewed as critical during emergencies—witness the early days of the HIV epidemic—but once the initial crisis subsides, attention and funding wane. We believe this is due in part to a fundamental misunderstanding about who they are and what allows them to be so effective in reducing disease burden, addressing the underlying causes of inequity, and improving health across many domains.

It is community health workers’ lived experience and shared group identity that allows them to engage deeply with communities that have been historically marginalized and dispossessed. Community is at the core of the profession and who community health workers are and is an essential element of the role.

Read the full article about community health workers by Victoria Adewumi and Noelle Wiggins at Grantmakers in Health.