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Florida A&M University (FAMU) will receive $300,000 of $600,000 for the clustering project titled Community Health Workers (CHW) Research and Training Institute. The collegial partnership yielded the University of Florida (UF) the remaining $300,000 of this project’s award.
FAMU Director of the Institute of Public Health and Principal Investigator Cynthia M. Harris said, “Florida A&M University is very excited about this academic-community partnership with UF, BCU, Workforce Plus and the communities of Gadsden, Alachua and Volusia counties. This partnership will enhance the overall health of communities through intensive community health worker training. Through this training, each one will reach one, and further empower the masses re: enhancing their own person health.
According to FAMU College of Pharmacy and Pharmaceutical Sciences’ professor Renee R. Reams and co-principal investigator said, “FAMU will work with the Quincy Workforce Plus office to recruit lay people to train as Community Health Workers (CHWs); this will be a paid training experience for these individuals after Phase I training. The trained lay CHWs will do a practicum in Phase II where they train lay individual in the use of health smart behaviors as interventions to fight obesity/weight and health problems. All persons who complete the program will be certified as skilled CHWs.”
FAMU will work together with workforce to help these skilled CHWs look for employment by creating a registry of trained/certificated CHW who can serve their communities or health care professionals as CHW. Although there is not a guarantee of employment, the FAMU cluster grant does provide a paid training experience to equip lay people with a marketable set of skills.
Reams said, “On average we hope to train 120 CHWs in the Quincy area and in turn these CHWs will train up to 300 families and individuals to adopt health smart behaviors that can help them fight obesity. The Health Smart Behaviors Program we use is copyrighted by our UF Collaborator Dr. Carolyn Tucker.”
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