With funding from the National Institutes of Health’s Community Engagement Alliance, starting in fall 2020, 11 academic medical centers and 75 community partners came together as the California Alliance Against COVID-19 to address COVID-19 inequities in California. Using data from focus groups, statewide meetings, and a statewide partner survey, we describe how promotoras and community health workers (P/CHWs; n = 540) helped to promote access to COVID-19 information, testing, and vaccination. We highlight opportunities to promote health equity among other public health collaborators with a P/CHW model.
The COVID-19 pandemic has brought to the forefront existing structural inequities and resulting challenges faced by historically marginalized communities. A partnership between promotoras and community health workers (P/CHWs) emerged as a promising culturally informed community-centered participatory approach that can support long-term collaborations of health care and public health systems with the communities most affected by public health crises. (author abstract)