It was 9 a.m. and freezing Thursday when Shanteny Jackson was walking down Richmond’s East Broad Street toward the Virginia General Assembly Building with a team of Community Health Workers, policy analysts and allies.
Jackson — who is executive director of the Virginia Community Health Worker Association — had been awake since 3 a.m. But the association’s Community Health Worker Awareness and Education Day was just starting.
“We have amazing people with us, we have partners who will help us get the message out,” she said while crossing 7th Street.
For Jackson and the CHWs, the aim of the event was to inform legislators about what they do and to raise awareness of a July 1 funding cliff that will see the Virginia Department of Health lose funding for about half of the CHWs employed at local health districts.
For allies working in policy, advocacy and other fields, the goal was to encourage legislators to vote for two proposed legislative fixes to the funding cliff.
CHWs are front-line public health workers. Many come from within the communities they serve and have personal experience with or connections to the health issues they’re addressing.
They’re often some of the only public health workers to have the trust of communities that have been ignored or mistreated by the U.S. public health establishment, such as Black Americans and immigrants who are not fluent in English.
CHWs have played essential roles in COVID-19 vaccination efforts, maternal and child health, substance use prevention and countless other public health initiatives around the commonwealth.
But without legislative action, the July 1 funding cliff will hamstring many of these efforts.
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Photo by me.