3.3 Train and Build Skills

Training community health workers (CHWs) means that you are training and investing into the community.

Training community members and then increasing the heart health knowledge of people in your program creates “shared responsibility.” This means that everyone feels as if he or she has an important role to play in heart health.

The heart health training and skill building that you share with CHWs will always be a part of the community. This is because CHWs are part of the community and want to help others. In that way, CHWs are strong and ongoing resources for your community and for your program.

Challenge

You may not have money to send people to trainings. You may also find that you have a group of CHWs to train, but they are at very different levels and you can only offer one training session.

Suggestions

• Address two key pieces of sustainability at the same time by partnering with other organizations that have CHWs who are interested in training. You may have enough people near you to convince a trainer to come out to you. You may be able to pool resources and send one or two people to be trained. Those trained CHWs can come back and train other CHWs.
• Tap into Web-based trainings and webinars for CHWs.
• Have more experienced CHWs mentor the newer CHWs. Ask the more experienced ones to take a bigger role in the training.

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