“Nothing About Us Without Us”: Best Practices Learned Through Supporting Community Health Workers in Hawai’i Nei and and Beyond

The purpose of this editorial is to illustrate important lessons that we have learned while working as community health workers (CHWs), or with CHWs, over the past 20 years nationally and in Hawai‘i. We describe our personal and professional encounters with the CHW movement over time, and share the values of the CHW movement and why these are important. We hope this editorial can provide useful, real-world histories from our lived experience to accompany the academic articles in this special issue and can help frame the discussion of CHW engagement and empowerment going forward.