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CHW Health Disparities Initiative

Communities in Action

The Community Health Worker Health Disparities Initiative uses the value and unique impact of trained community health workers (CHWs) to promote heart health and to connect people to health care in communities nationwide.

Knowing what works is essential to bringing programs to your community. This section contains implementation strategies, evaluations and outcomes, lessons learned, and success stories from selected Initiative projects.

Strategic Champions

The Strategic Champions are nine organizations that received funding from the NHLBI to implement innovative activities to broaden the use of the NHLBI’s curricula and materials to address heart health in the community. The Strategic Champions established partnerships and implemented sustainable CHW heart health programs that targeted specific ethnic groups.

NHLBI Curricula Targets Different Ethnicities

Below are examples of past projects that have used the NHLBI’s heart health curricula to implement programs. These projects are broken down by ethnicity.

African American Communities

American Indian/Alaska Native Communities

Filipino American Communities

Hispanic/Latino Communities

Promoting Heart Health in the Americas

PAHO and the NHLBI funded three 3-year (2007-2010) community-based projects to adapt the Your Heart, Your Life manual for use in low-resource communities in Argentina, Chile, and Guatemala. The NHLBI-PAHO partnership generated international interest in using the CHW model to deliver heart health education in selected UnitedHealth and NHLBI Collaborating Centers of Excellence, and it stimulated the creation of a CHW subcommittee to collect and share lessons learned among projects.

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Last Updated: June 2014