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Our Community Health Worker Initiatives and its basis in lived community experience.

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Community to Careers: Community Health Workers

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Community Health Workers Needed Everywhere!

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Community Health Workers Needed Everywhere!

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CHWI Team members Mayra Perez and Venice Ceballos are also working on publishing a paper on Lived Experience: Lived Experience, Power that a Degree Cannot Give You in Higher Education

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Community to Careers: Community Health Workers - Venice Ceballos

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En La Tierra del Encanto listening to our gente and discussing what ways to shift power centering community needs.

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In San Antonio, sharing stories, listening, visiting places, escuchando musica, eating comida all while contemplating community power.

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The journey started with our own lived experiences and conversations with our communities, familias and CHWs/CHRs. Prior to Root Change our communities had shared many stories about the lack of recognition of lived experience. We had also been focusing on how to center community within our institution (the university) focusing on Community Based Participatory Research and Action and how to shift paradigms to recognize lived experience. Participating in Root Change has strengthened our reflection efforts on how to center community power at CHWI and throughout our communities. What are actions we can take to shift power and continue to center community in the way communities wish to be centered. For us the focus has been community health workers/representatives and what they have shared with us regarding the recognition of lived experience both within the university setting and throughout the non-profit and corporate sectors of employment. Our aim has been to continue learning how we can leverage our power toward actions that embody what communities have shared they would like to see change.

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Steps we have taken together - San Antonio 2023

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Beginning in San Antonio we discovered that we had many intersections of focus with Allies in Caring (Copelia and Ivette) regarding community health workers and lived experience. After departing San Antonio we met via Zoom in August 2023 to connect further trying to figure out where to focus our learning collaboration. We discussed overlap with our collective behavioral/mental health work and recognition of lived experience. We have maintained communication and hope to continue brainstorming areas that our lean experiment(s) weave together from Nuevo México to New Jersey.

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In order to further connect learning and doing we met with our HR representative in September 2023 to explore the ways we can work with the university to better recognize lived experience specifically for the CHW/CHR role. One thing to highlight that we are working on from this meeting is to get UNM to recognize the NMDOH state CHW Certification as an equivalent to the HS Diploma or GED requirement. The meeting with HR led to many actions we have worked on toward the recognition of lived experience.

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Community Power is many things and our learnings are ongoing. We have learned from all the organizations, the stories, the travels and most of all the human connections. There are many individual instances to reflect on and for the moment the experience of getting to know and share spaces with this collective group of awesome humans is the highlight.

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We are still working to understand what this means for us in terms of our Root Change collective work. We consider it a living definition that we are still collectively forming. As we work collectively to understand and define community power we hope to understand it as it relates to the group, to us as individuals and to our communities of Nuevo México.

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¿Ahora qué? - ¡Más café en Bogoá Por Favor!

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¿Ahora qué? - ¡Más café en Bogoá Por Favor!

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We have a CHW/CHR community gathering coming up to discuss next steps with our lean experiment and collaborative work with Root Change. We hope to visit more of the partners to further connections and learning and maybe a return for the full group to Bogotá is in our future.