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About NACHW

Community health workers united nationally to support communities in achieving health, equity, and social justice.

What We Do

The National Association of Community Health Workers (NACHW) was founded in April 2019 after several years of planning and organizing by Community Health Workers (CHWs) and allies across the United States. NACHW is a 501(c)(3) nonprofit membership-driven organization with a mission to unify CHWs across geography, ethnicity, sector and experience to support communities to achieve health, equity and social justice.

Community Health Worker is an umbrella term and includes community health representatives, promotores, peers and other workforce members who are frontline public health professionals that share life experience, trust, compassion, cultural and value alignment with the communities where they live and serve.

Our values – self-determination and self-empowerment of our workforce; integrity of character; dignity and respect for every human being, social justice and equity to ensure fair treatment, access, opportunity and outcomes for all individuals and communities – guide our work. They are north stars we will use to support our members, foster partnerships, advocate nationally, develop strategic objectives, and assess our impact.

NACHW is led by an Executive Director who is also a CHW, and enjoys governance from a national Board of Directors of predominately CHWs and allies with decades of research and practice expertise in CHW training and workforce development, community organizing and engagement, intervention design, equity and social justice advocacy, research and policy leadership.

Values

Self-empowerment

Promoting self-actualization and self-advocacy among community health workers.

Social Justice & Equity

Ensuring fair treatment, access, opportunity advancement and outcomes for individuals and communities.

Unity

Encouraging collaboration among community health workers to promote a common professional identity regardless of job title or work-setting.

Self-determination

Promoting the efforts of the community health workers, and the communities in which they work to create a shared vision and direction for the future.

Integrity

Promoting and nurturing the authenticity and character of the community health worker profession and promoting the contributions made by Community Health Workers toward eliminating health disparities and advancing.

Dignity & Respect

Building trusted relationships based on honoring the inherent value and contributions of every person irrespective of socioeconomic class, religion, race, national origin, language spoken, immigration status, abilities or disabilities, age, sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity/expression.

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