Supporting Peers and Community Health Workers in Their Roles
Peers and community health workers support service recipients by drawing on personal experiences or community ties. This approach advances the use of shared decision-making, trauma-informed care, recovery-oriented perspectives and individualized models of support. Its value has become increasingly recognized across health care settings.
The needs-based toolkit from the NYC Peer and Community Health Workforce Consortium helps organizations support and integrate peers and community health workers. You can complete an online self-assessment to evaluate your organizational readiness. After you finish the assessment, you will see an automatically customized toolkit based on your responses.
The toolkit provides organization-specific guidance in the following nine practice areas:
- Recruitment
- Attitudes and Beliefs
- Diversity and Inclusion
- Finances and Sustainability
- Role Clarity and Workflows
- Career Advancement Opportunities
- Supervision
- Orientation and On-Boarding
- Program Monitoring and Evaluation
These recommended practices can help your organization recruit and retain peers and community health workers, maintain organizational growth and sustainability, and engage service recipients.
Additional Resources
- Workforce Integration of Peer and Community Health Worker Roles: A Needs-Based Toolkit (PDF)
- Role of Community Health Workers