The Community Health Worker (CHW) Initiative: Responsive Engagement, Community Capacity and Emergent Health

Abstract

As basic STS theory has long argued, the framing of health in terms of personal responsibility, disease, and risk factors has fragmented our trusted sense of self in community and undercut any robust feeling of shared, regenerative, and resilient health. The CHW Initiative at the University of Houston recasts the relationship between university expertise and community to support shared responsiveness through training and supporting embedded CHWs in a variety of preventive and community health activities. By framing health (and community) in terms of embedded capacities to respond together to problems, the CHW Initiative can sidestep the pernicious dichotomies of active / passive, diseased / at-risk, and isolated cause / discrete effect. In concrete terms, instead of experts having a correct language that they teach the community to speak as a precondition to taking action, the CHW Initiative teaches a commitment to becoming trustworthy in working together toward better health. The experts play a role within the emerging health of the community, as responsive to the needs articulated by the CHWs in their efforts to support a trustworthy community of health. The CHWs participate in a shared practice of evidence generation, and commit to enabling responsive engagement of open science in building community health. The panel is composed of faculty, recent students and CHWs engaged in the initiative and exploring its potential and its limits as a response to disempowering biomedical paradigms.

Individual Presentations

• Policy is Destiny in Community Health: How Policy Decisions Drive Local Community Health Worker Employment. - Abel Chacko, State of Texas Senate Committee on Health Policy

• Community STEM Educators: Community Health as a Shared Science Project - Cara Shokler, University of Houston, Honors College

• School Nurses, Asthma, and Trust: Stories, Messaging, and Technology - Cindy Paz, University of Houston, Honors College

• Enabling Advocacy 2: Care Coordination and Community Inclusion - Donaji Stelzig, University of Houston, Honors College

• Vulnerability and Care in Community Health Work - Erica Hua Fletcher, Hope and Healing Center & Institute

Session Organizer

• Daniel Price, University of Houston, Honors College