Lessons learned from a community-academic initiative: the development of a core competency-based training for community-academic initiative community health workers.

Objectives: Despite the importance of community health workers (CHWs) in strategies to reduce health disparities and the call to enhance their roles in research, little information exists on how to prepare CHWs involved in community-academic initiatives (CAIs). Therefore, the New York University Prevention Research Center piloted a CAI-CHW training program.

Methods: We applied a core competency framework to an existing CHW curriculum and bolstered the curriculum to include research-specific sessions.