Community Support Worker Information

Community Health Workers (CHWs) are non-professional health care providers who give support to patients and their families as they go through pregnancy, childbirth and parenthood.

CHWs take direction from patients and their families about their priorities and can help with things like:

● accessing benefits and services like Employment Insurance and maternity benefits, the Affordable Child Care Benefit, Income Assistance, the Housing Registry, and many more

● mapping current social connections and community supports and building new ones

● figuring out the immigration journey

● connecting to free or affordable supports for physical and mental health

Your first visit with the Community Health Worker will be a chance to get to know one another. The CHW will have a lot of questions for you as you work together to assess your social determinants of health - things like housing, income, employment, social connection, status and immigration journey that shape your physical, mental and social health.

The CHW will work with you to identify the areas where you want to make changes and to prioritise the changes and improvements that are most important to you and your family.

The CHW will make a plan with you, with specific goals, and with a timeline that works for you.

The CHW will provide you with information about what services, supports and resources are out there, help you to figure out your eligibility, and help you connect to the ones that are right for you.

The CHW will work together with you to fill out paperwork, make phone calls to government agencies, and navigate relationships with landlords, employers and service providers.

When working with a Community Health Worker, you decide what you want to work on, when, and how you would like to approach the challenges in your own life. You are the expert, and CHWs are here to support you!

● Patient led

● Strengths based

● Capacity building

● Community Integrated

Patient led means that the SCBP patients and their families set their own priorities for what they want to work with CHWs on. Community Health Workers help to identify areas that need attention by providing resources, background knowledge and options. They support follow through by providing encouragement, structure and accountability.

Strengths based means that the point of departure in these discussions is recognition of the strengths and resilience that have allowed SCBP families to survive and thrive to this point in their lives. It means recognizing people as the experts in their own lives and that

CHWs are there to give options, encouragement and support, not to correct or fix people.

Capacity building means that the CHW’s role is to develop SCBP patients' own understanding of their situation and capacity to act to change it. It means our work should be focused on working alongside, being transparent, and encouraging SCBP patients and families to learn skills in systems navigation, finding resources and self-advocacy.

Community integrated means that CHWs approach this work as peers and look to build equitable, supportive relationships. They build on connections rooted in shared identity (language, culture, nationality) and on shared experiences of migration, poverty, lone parenting, housing precariousness or insecurity, addiction and mental health struggles, and more.