Community Health Workers on the Forefront with the Communities Fighting COVID! Project

Communities Fighting COVID! (CFC) is a partnership between the SDSU School of Public Health (SPH) and the County of San Diego Health and Human Services Agency dedicated to addressing disparities related to COVID-19 in San Diego, the 5th largest county in the U.S.  CFC uses a Community Health Worker-led approach to conduct contact tracing in four priority communities: Hispanic/Latinos, Arabic-speakers, Tagalog-speakers, and African Americans.

 

The 30+ Communities Fighting COVID! Community Health Workers (CHWs) are ethnically and racially representative of the communities being supported and provide services that are culturally appropriate and linguistically concordant. CHWs notify individuals who have had close contact with a COVID-positive person and help them figure out how to safely and feasibly quarantine. The CHWs provide critical phone and in-person home-based assessments throughout the quarantine period. Most importantly, they take a holistic approach, by finding needed resources and even delivering emergency food bundles to families experiencing food insecurity.

 

In order to ensure the most appropriate services are being provided to the community, the Communities Fighting COVID! team continuously evaluates their practices. To learn more about CHW-strategies and ongoing work, check out the AP News article: “Minority US contact tracers build trust in diverse cities.”