Welcome to El Sol Neighborhood Educational Center (El Sol). El Sol is a pioneer in Community Health Workers (CHWs) and Promotores programs in the Inland Empire, California. El Sol is the leading agency focused on identifying, training, deploying, and supporting CHWs and promotores in the region.
We are Community Health Workers and Promotores!
Community health workers (CHWs) and promotores are at the center of everything we do. Each year, El Sol serves over 50,000 community residents through its programs led by CHWs and promotores. El Sol has been serving the Inland Empire for more than 30 years working to achieve positive, measurable change. El Sol offers foundations and other organizations technical assistance on the development and implementation of CHWs and promotores programs to identify and target community priorities.
El Sol provides home visitation with trained professionals who give parent coaching and comprehensive resource referrals in the home and community. Home visitation has proven through research to be effective in reducing child abuse and neglect, improving child development, reducing preterm births, improving maternal and child health, increasing school readiness, reducing reliance on public financial benefits, and reducing crime. It is an invaluable model for improving family outcomes, preventing expensive crisis-based intervention, and triaging families to appropriate and needed services. Some of the areas of El Sol’s expertise include: knowledge & awareness in family strengthening strategies, team building, community collaboration, sustainability and performance improvement.
Focus: El Sol works to achieve positive, measurable change across various levels of the social-ecological model. Specifically, through its community health workers and promotores, El Sol works to influence change across three interrelated spheres of the social ecological model.
El Sol has a robust, positive track record developing the capacity of grassroots community residents to serve as CHWs and promotores. This is at the core of all strategies designed to address social determinants of health. Additionally, CHWs and promotores are deployed to effectively engage and educate community residents to achieve measurable changes in knowledge, attitudes, skills, and behaviors.
CHWs and promotores work to engage, organize, and mobilize community residents in addressing community-level social determinants of health. El Sol is committed to building collaborations, knowledge-sharing, and high standards and ensuring best practices among organizations using the community health worker model. Through the years and in collaboration with healthcare and education institutions, El Sol has been working to integrate CHWs and promotores in healthcare and educational systems.
El Sol’s Community Engagement Policy Initiative was created to address capacity challenges in how to engage communities in policy advocacy. El Sol implements innovative multi-site, cross-cultural and inter-generational strategies to organize and engage residents and policy makers in promoting policies and programs that foster environments that support sustainable healthy lifestyles.
El Sol’s programs are based on an Equity Framework with intentional focus on engaging community leaders representing communities who have not traditionally participated in leadership roles in county-wide initiatives. El Sol is committed to promoting equity in the region to intentionally contribute to eliminating racial and other demographic differences in social and health outcomes by examining individual and organizational beliefs and changing practices to counteract the contemporary and historical impact of racism and discrimination.
Community health workers (CHWs) also known as promotores are catalyst for sustainable individual and community change. The CHWs model follows specific principles and operational guidelines that govern the identification, training and technical assistance, support and development, and evaluation of CHWs and promotores. It is not enough to merely hire outreach workers.
El Sol has demonstrated a robust and positive track record in the use of CHWs and promotores to address various factors in social determinants of health. El Sol is pleased to be a pioneer in the implementation of programs using the CHW and promotores model in the Inland Empire and to have contributed to positioning the model as an effective strategy in the region. The success coupled with increased state and local funding for CHWs and promotores programs has led many organizations to value and adopt CHW and promotores programs.
El Sol’s record is 30 years of experience implementing innovative, community-driven, multi-dimensional, culturally and linguistically tailored interventions with diverse communities using community health workers and promotores.
El Sol has developed partnerships with evidence-based programs such Parent-Child Home Program (PCHP), and the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY). El Sol is the only accredited Healthy Families America practitioner in the region. A sample of partners include: