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Primary Submission Category: Methodological approaches to studying public health
Reimagining workforce research through community engagement: Insights from New York State’s first CHW landscape study
Authors: Meghan Armocida, Karina Liberata, Kayla Fennelly, Azul Savid, Amy Freeman,
Presenting Author: Meghan Armocida*
Community Health Workers (CHWs) play an increasingly important role in addressing social drivers of health for diverse populations by helping to navigate healthcare and social services. Despite their documented effectiveness on a range of health-related outcomes, a full picture of the New York State (NYS) CHW workforce remains unclear, restricting efforts to inform workforce policy and best practices. This presentation will discuss community-engaged methods used to develop and implement NYS’s first CHW workforce landscape study, with the goal of strengthening academic-community collaboration, improving measurement, and optimizing CHW workforce advocacy efforts. Methods include integrating a CHW into the research team and establishing both a Project Advisory Board (PAB) and Community Advisory Board (CAB). The CHW-researcher contributes their first-hand experience of patient-facing work to co-develop study materials, support facilitation of advisory boards, conduct bilingual interviews with CHW participants, and disseminate findings. The PAB, a smaller group of five CHWs and five employers, meets regularly to provide in-depth insight on study materials and ensure appropriateness for CHW and CHW employer populations, including refining instruments and informing recruitment strategies. The CAB, a 25-member group of NYS CHWs, employers, and workforce leaders, guides research priorities, leads dissemination of findings, and fosters connection with one another to break down organizational silos and strengthen communication across regions and settings. Taken together, this community-engaged approach improves the rigor of study findings and ensures data can accurately drive policy and practice. In the context of historical mistrust toward academic institutions, this approach demonstrates how community-engaged methods reinforce lived experience as an integral part of actionable research and can be applied across contexts.