Involving Community Health Workers as Evaluation Leaders in a National Community Health Worker Initiative

The community health workers (CHWs) for COVID Response and Resilient Communities initiative further established CHWs as a critical public health workforce through substantial investment in CHW-led activities. The initiative supported CHWs at 67 sites nationwide to mitigate the most severe consequences of COVID-19 among vulnerable populations while strengthening community capacity to address future public health threats in the United States. It also created opportunities for CHWs to serve as leaders in evaluating their own profession. Based on a review of the literature regarding CHW involvement in research and evaluation and using autoethnography, we-predominantly CHWs-describe the process of including CHWs as evaluation leaders in the initiative. We illuminate successes, such as positioning CHWs in paid team roles, and challenges, such as time constraints. We conclude that involving CHWs as evaluation leaders helped ensure that findings more accurately reflected the strengths and needs of communities, particularly those that have been historically marginalized. Future public health efforts involving CHWs should engage CHWs in all evaluation activities, from study design through final dissemination to produce findings that are more valid and usable and contribute to CHW self-determination and CHW workforce sustainability. (Am J Public Health. 2026;116(S4):S353-S357. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2026.308605).