Promotores de Salud

"Our Promotores de Salud clue us in to what the real needs of the community are—not just what, or where, we think they are. They have made us wiser as an organization, guiding us toward interventions and services that truly resonate with the people we serve." 

- Susan Bauer, Executive Director
When we sent our first Promotores de Salud out into the community in 1996, we soon saw that we were on to something big: an award-winning program that would fundamentally change how we connect with and care for our communities. 

Our Promotores de Salud are peer health educators, advocates, and navigators for the communities we serve. They are the crucial link between CHP’s health care services and the agricultural workers and families who reside in isolated areas.

Over the years, our Promotores de Salud have helped their communities improve oral health knowledge and practices, reduce substance abuse and intimate partner violence, increase HIV testing, and improve cancer screening and early detection rates, all through peer-led interventions. They have also helped us better understand the occupational safety risks that are unique to agricultural workers.

We are grateful to have such an amazing team of peer advocates and wouldn't be the organization we are today without them!

Promotores help CHP by:

  • Reporting back from the field and letting us know what’s important to the health of each community by conducing research, administering surveys, and identifying unmet needs. 
  • Educating their peers via health promotion and wellness conversations. Promotores reinforce the importance of ongoing preventive health care, like annual Pap smears, colon cancer screening, and wellness services for children. 
  • Keeping individuals healthy by identifying those in need of additional care for chronic conditions like diabetes or hypertension. Promotores connect patients to health care professionals.
  • Keeping the community healthy by promoting safe workplace practices, conducting work place safety training, and modeling safe practices.
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Above: Participants in CHP's award-winning Hombres Unidos program, a peer-led intimate partner violence prevention that our Promotores de Salud helped make possible. Our national partner for this project, Migrant Clinicians Network, received the Mary Byron Project Roth Award for the Hombres Unidos program.
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Above: Kankakee Promotores de Salud with Outreach Promotores Coordinator, Ramono Alvarado (lower left) and Quality Improvement Manager, Maria Villagomez (upper left).