History of the program
The CWA program was the brainchild of Tlingít elder and longtime health promoter Phil Moreno, who passed away in 2006.
Phil's idea was to create a program for health promotion and disease prevention that was modeled after the state's very successful Community Health Aide/Practitioner program. The CHAP program was created in the 1950s to provide village health workers with basic medical knowledge, so they could treat minor ailments in their community where a doctor or mid-level provider might not be available.
Phil thought the CWAs could work in each village alongside the CHAPs and Community Family Service Workers (village behavioral health workers), who usually were too busy providing clinical services to spend much time working on health promotion. The CWA program is focused less on the treatment of ailments and more on health promotion and disease prevention.
Before the CWA program was established, members of SEARHC's health promotion staff made yearly visits to the region's smaller communities that had a need for health promotion and disease prevention services. But it became clear it was better to train local people who could provide these services in their own communities than it was to rely on visiting health promoters.
The CWA program was established in 1998 as a regional program in Southeast Alaska, and expanded into a statewide program in 2001. In 2006, the Alaska Health Education Consortium honored the CWA program with its Barbara Berger Award for excellence in health education and health promotion in Alaska.
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SouthEast Alaska Regional Health Consortium
Information from CWA