Multicultural Health Foundation, a community-based health organization that brings justice and wellness to multicultural communities in San Diego, was awarded a County of San Diego Health & Human Services contract in September 2020 to launch Community Health Worker and Outreach Services related to COVID-19. This contract utilizes collaboration among community-based partners to engage 180,000 Black and African American residents in San Diego County on the topics of COVID-19 testing, treatment, contact tracing, and prevention measures, such as masking and social distancing. The Multicultural Health Foundation has been utilizing social media, digital campaigns, emailing, and broadly working with partners to spread the word about COVID-19 educational webinars and panels, as well as other services.
The Institute of Public Health’s Lisa Asmus, MPH, is the primary investigator (PI) of a contract to develop sustainable program data collection, evaluation, and outcome reporting for the COVID-19 Community Health Worker Outreach Services at Multicultural Health Foundation. Due to COVID-19 restrictions, Asmus has developed online surveys and logs that collect data for reporting to the County of San Diego and address institutional goals of understanding participants’ health behaviors, such as utilization of preventative health services. As a part of these evaluation services, Asmus also compiles data for weekly review and composes monthly evaluations for the Multicultural Health Foundation. As an evaluator, she believes these actions are important to empower community-based organizations to focus on their direct-service work, while also sustainably gaining skills to gather information about the effectiveness of their services for future grant opportunities. This is especially important for the Multicultural Health Foundation considering the thousands of community contacts they are making each month. Asmus is an SDSU alumna of the MPH in Epidemiology and has been working for the Institute of Public Health since 1997.
