April 30, 2024
Over the last eight years, Central Health’s Community Health Champions program has graduated more than 360 dedicated, engaged advocates for health resources and equity in Central Texas. Many are community leaders and organizers, public health professionals and healthcare innovators, with a few regular folks who just care about healthcare. It’s been a great success.
This year, Community Health Champions is introducing new programs tailored to the needs of those with lived experience on the wrong side of Central Texas’ health disparities. The first class of “accelerated” Community Health Champions – so-named because it’s faster-paced than the traditional five-month program – spent March becoming educated and empowered about their rights to access healthcare and the resources that are available.
The class, conducted entirely in Spanish, included 18 people (17 of them women) from the St. Johns’ neighborhood. They met for weekly workshops at Webb Middle School, with support from Austin Voices for Education and Youth, a nonprofit that’s based in St. Johns and helps and advocates for families in the neighborhood.
“I am very happy, very excited, because this is the first time I get to be involved in something like this and I went all out,” Francisco Navarro told us. “I want to be able to provide more information and transmit that same enthusiasm to people, so that they, too, can be participants in this truth.”
That “truth” included group exercises focused on exploring healthcare barriers and access to care. Participants learned about and discussed issues that Central Health is also working on, such as healthcare equity, social determinants of health, community outreach and engagement, and local clinics and services – issues that persist in areas of disinvestment like St. Johns.
Several of the participants are Community Health Workers, or promotoras de salud, who work in their own communities, connecting their own neighbors to the resources available for them to care for their health. New Health Champ Teresa Barrera Rivera told us, “It’s important for us as health promoters to know about the resources we have.”
Another promotora in the class, Denisse Badillo-Mendoza, told us, “Now that I got help with a lot of resources, I can share them with my community. I can also now help my community with applications for MAP.”
Central Health’s Medical Access Program (MAP) and MAP Basic provided health coverage to more than 130,000 Travis County residents in 2023. That’s a lot, but it’s not everyone who needs health coverage who might qualify for MAP. One of the reasons St. Johns was the site of the accelerated Health Champions class is that the area is home to fewer MAP members than our demographers expected. That’s also true of Colony Park, which will host the next course, also in Spanish, in May.
To learn more about the Community Health Champions visit us online at centralhealth.net/get-involved/community-health-champions.
