Pilot Promotoras de Salud Cohort: Ready to Serve

“(I appreciated) the knowledge we acquired about culture and personality – since this will help me perform my job as a promotora in the organization and my community.” – Participant in Para Los Niños’ pilot Promotoras de Salud cohort

When parent leaders at Para Los Niños recommended that we start a Promotoras de Salud (community health outreach worker) project to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic, we were all in. We had already been sponsoring vaccine clinics and resource tables, but we needed the capacity to reach deeper into our community to counter the misinformation about the virus and the vaccine. From August to November, 2021, six Latina PLN members (including three Leadership Academy graduates), participated in 20 hours of training to reach deep into the South King County Latino community with COVID-19 prevention resources, accurate vaccine information, and more.

Promotoras de Salud is a Latin American community health education model that has been successfully adopted in communities across the United States. The model centers the lived experiences of lay educators – primarily women – to connect with Spanish speaking communities often neglected by mainstream health care providers. PLN partnered with the King County Health Department and the King County Promotores Network to design and lead four training sessions with topics ranging from COVID19 vaccine and testing basics to visible and invisible manifestations of culture.

The sessions on community leadership models and definitions of racial equity were popular with participants. One new promotora pointed to “the opportunity to share experiences to better understand the concepts (of racial equity)” as a personal highlight, while another praised the participatory training methods for increasing her confidence and knowledge of her new role.

As the Omicron variant has begun to spread, PLN is grateful we can support our six trusted and trained promotoras de salud to meet our Latino families where they are at to stop the spread of COVID19 in our community.