Kern County Symposium Highlights Future of Promotora Work
VICTORIA RODGERS
A Kern County symposium hosted as part of the Kern Coalition and California Jobs First efforts on Tuesday brought community organizations and workforce representatives together to discuss expanding the role of promotoras beyond health care and creating more sustainable, paid opportunities for the community health workers (CHWs) doing the work.
“The goal for this symposium is to elevate the role of the promotoras,” said Miriam Hernandez, director of the Workforce Development Department. She said organizers wanted participants to better understand how promotoras and CHWs are working in communities and the impact of their work.
Promotoras are typically trusted members of the communities they serve. Their work can include outreach, education, helping residents navigate services, and connecting people with resources.
While the model is often associated with health care, Vision y Compromiso Associate Director of Programs Melinda Cordero-Barzaga said it can also be used in schools, local government, research, environmental advocacy, and other settings where institutions need stronger connections with the people they serve.
“It could be in parks and rec, it could be in a school, it could be in a church. It’s that liaison between community and the system that they’re representing. It could be in the county,” said Cordero-Barzaga.
The model has particular relevance in rural areas, Cordero-Barzaga said, where residents may have to travel farther for services. During a presentation on the model’s history in Kern County, Cordero-Barzaga pointed to communities including Arvin and Lamont, where residents can face gaps in nearby health services.
Visión y Compromiso began organizing promotoras in Kern County after conversations with local health leaders around 2006, according to the presentation. A committee made up of promotoras and agency representatives was established in 2007 and helped build a local network that later supported training programs, partnerships, and funded outreach work.
That network also became important during the COVID-19 pandemic, when organizations were able to mobilize promotoras to provide residents with information and assistance.
But much of the model’s history has been rooted in unpaid labor.
Cordero-Barzaga said many promotoras began as volunteers, including women and farmworkers who were already serving as trusted leaders in their communities. Over time, advocates pushed for the work to be recognized as a profession that deserved compensation.
“We have the heart of service, and we want to serve, but we have to leave our children, and we have to pay for transportation. We can’t do this for free,” Cordero-Barzaga said, describing concerns promotoras raised about sustaining their work.
Today, more organizations are hiring promotoras rather than relying solely on volunteers, according to Cordero-Barzaga. She added that, while there is no single statewide pay standard, some positions pay between $20 and $30 an hour, with some employers also offering benefits.
Changes within Medi-Cal have also created a potential funding source.
Cordero-Barzaga discussed California’s community health worker benefit, which allows certain CHW services to be reimbursed through Medi-Cal health plans. They described it as an opportunity to create more sustainable funding for work promotoras are already doing, while acknowledging that billing requirements can be difficult for organizations to navigate.
The shift also requires more training, documentation, coaching, and supervision for workers who may have entered the field through informal community roles. Still, she emphasized that the relationships promotoras already have are difficult for institutions to reproduce.
During the symposium, a program manager from a Fresno organization described promotoras helping community members understand letters from county agencies, renew Medi-Cal or CalFresh benefits and identify important deadlines.
Even when government notices are provided in Spanish, she said, residents may still need someone to explain what the documents mean and walk them through what they need to do next.
That trust, Cordero-Barzaga said, is what allows promotoras to do more than simply distribute information.
“We build relationships. They cannot do their work. I mean, they could do their work, but then they would be just an outreach worker talking outside. We don’t do that. We are the community. We know what’s happening with the individuals we’re talking to,” she said.
Participants also discussed how the model could be used outside health care. Cordero-Barzaga pointed to research as one example, stating that some universities train promotoras and community health workers to work alongside researchers and help bring community perspectives into studies.
Others work in environmental health and advocacy, helping residents identify neighborhood concerns and participate in discussions about potential solutions.
Workforce development emerged as another focus of the symposium. Participants discussed connecting promotora programs with existing workforce training dollars and employment resources instead of relying entirely on short-term grants.
Visión y Compromiso has also developed pathways for promotoras who may not want or be able to enter traditional employment, including entrepreneurship and worker collectives that can contract with organizations to provide community services.
Those efforts reflect a broader shift in the promotora model from predominantly volunteer work toward paid employment, formal training and integration into larger health and social-service systems.
Cordero-Barzaga said the next challenge is creating long-term systems that compensate workers equitably, provide training and supervision, and preserve the community relationships that make the model effective.
For organizations in Kern County, the symposium offered a chance to consider how a role long associated with health outreach could be used more broadly to help residents navigate complicated systems and bring community experience into the institutions serving them.