Get Certified as a CHW: Your organization can schedule a CHI CHW certification course. A list of some of the organizations and programs that do Community Health Work is in progress but a partial list can also be found under TCHI partners.
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CHI Community Health Worker Program Summary Overview
Rhode Island’s first comprehensive core skills community health worker (CHW) certificate program. It will educate CHWs to be facilitators, community based organizations employees and community members to provide more community oriented programs, focus and responsiveness. The program provides an entry level program that is sensitive to adult education needs. The community health workers course in CHI will provide CHWs with the ability to:
- Create conversations in communities to bridge and collaborate with agencies, organizations and institutions to make change.
- Create opportunity to harness , hone, and honor untapped community talents to better health and well-being.
- Bring people together to facilitate access, navigate for those in need and identify the assets of community.
Our organization, the Community Health Innovations, CHW certificate course will complement CCRI efforts by creating more community based educational opportunities, service provisions and capacity building that will have recognized transferable credits.
Target population, number of people to be directly served, and geographic area
Our program is to train and create more professionally trained CHWs that will provide services to underserved and vulnerable communities. Each course could train and certify from 12 to 15 CHWs or trainers. The certificate course consists of 15, 3-hour workshops and requires field work for certification. Our program provides the core skills to be a for CHWs in 45 credit hours. The Rhode Island Department of Health requires 70 credit hours and 6months full time and or experiential hours for certifications. We and/or your employer will work to supply additional specialty hours and hours to fulfill the hours needed if you seek certification. This could potentially take 6 months or a year of field work unless concurrent or prior work experience or internships can be documented.
An unpublished survey of CHW programs by the Transcultural Community Health Initiative in 2005 noted that the organizations that had CHWs provide services to a population that ranged from 400 to as many or over 3000.
