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:
These recommended practices can help your organization recruit and retain peers and community health workers, maintain organizational growth and sustainability, and engage service recipients.