Community health workers are the health advocates for their communities. They work with both their community and health professionals to provide health and promote wellness. As such, a CHW’s job can take on many forms. At-risk kids, the HIV population and prospective college students are just a few examples of groups they help.

Durrell Fox grew up in poverty. Although social justice and community development were his passions, he wanted to make a decent salary to help his family. "At that time, I didn’t know of any good paying jobs working with youth or doing community outreach," he writes in an email. So, Fox went to business school, got his bachelor’s degree in business administration and went to work at a telephone company.

And he hated it.

What he enjoyed was the volunteering he was doing with youth in Boston. So, after a few years of hating his job and loving his volunteering, Fox quit his job with the telephone company and went to work at a community health center, suffering a 50% pay cut to do so.

Since then, he has assumed many job titles, including outreach coordinator, outreach educator, community liaison, project director and co-facilitator. But in essence, he was a community health worker all along, before the term was even coined back in 2000.

Most community health workers have at least a high school diploma and sometimes a one-year certificate or two-year associate’s degree in wellness or some related subject area. Once CHWs are hired, there is often some on-the-job training. But perhaps more important than any degree or certificate is a deep understanding of the community they are seeking to serve.

"The CHW profession is a calling, and I feel those who become CHWs most likely are or should already be engaged in serving the community in some capacity," Fox says. "In other words, it’s my belief that this is not a profession that you can simply join due to some training or certificate."