Vulnerability and Care in Community Health Work

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

Abstract

For many CHWs in training, the social determinants of health—such as access to reliable transportation, time to prepare meals, access to fresh food, stable housing, and the mental stress of poverty itself—are precisely the motivating causes which brought them to their current field of study. Once certified and employed, community health workers will often continue to face such structural barriers to health, even as they work to support others in their attempts to access health care services. In short, the shared recognition of lived experience that community health workers can provide clients may also be sources of their own continuing pain and vulnerability to ongoing forms of structural violence. This paper seeks to describe the ways in which community health care that heals can also wound those who provide it. It discusses the potential for exploitation in the forms of care provided by community health workers, and points to the need for structural awareness in developing appropriate roles for community health workers as vulnerable laborers themselves.

Author

• Erica Hua Fletcher, Hope and Healing Center & Institute