CHW Corps
Building a Health Equity Workforce for Diverse Californians
We connect education, healthcare, and community to grow a skilled, diverse workforce.
Scale of Unmet Need & Demand
More than one billion people worldwide live with a mental health condition, roughly one in seven people on earth. The World Health Organization documents that ninety-one percent of people living with depression globally cannot access care, and a 2025 study in JAMA Psychiatry found that only 6.9 percent of people with mental health or substance use disorders receive the treatment they need.
In the United States, 61.5 million adults lived with a mental health condition in 2024, and 29.5 million did not receive treatment. The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention’s 2023 Youth Risk Behavior Survey documented that 39.7 percent of high school students experienced persistent feelings of sadness and hopelessness, and 20.4 percent seriously considered attempting suicide. In California, almost one-quarter of adults with a mental illness are unable to receive the treatment they need, with no improvement over the past decade, and all fifty-eight California counties face shortages across every behavioral health workforce role examined, with an estimated need for 55,298 additional providers by 2025 and 171,413 by 2033.
California has enacted Medi-Cal billing infrastructure for nine non-licensed community behavioral health workforce categories, including Community Health Workers, Medi-Cal Peer Support Specialists, and Certified Wellness Coaches. Proposition 1, passed by California voters in March 2024, is leveraged to invest $2.4 billion in behavioral health workforce training over the first five years. Healthforce Center at the University of California San Francisco documents that California’s clinic-based employers would ideally hire approximately twelve times more community health workers than they currently employ if funding were not the barrier. The need is unmet at scale. The training infrastructure to produce the workforce that meets it is what California has not yet built.
A Health Workforce Built by the Community for the Community
The result is a training capacity gap that consortium-based community college training infrastructure is among the few mechanisms positioned to close. Our response is a community-college-anchored workforce pipeline that recruits from the communities documented above, trains workers through accessible credentialed pathways aligned to Medi-Cal qualification requirements, and places them in Medi-Cal-reimbursable employment with enrolled Supervising Provider organizations. The workforce we produce is bilingual, lived-experience, and culturally fluent in the communities where it serves, because it is recruited from those communities, trained alongside its neighbors, and returned to the neighborhoods that need it most.
HUMANDREAM Foundation is the program operations and backbone organization of the California Community Health Workforce Development Program consortium, a multi-institutional initiative co-led with Peer Voices United across Los Angeles, Orange, and Ventura counties, with partners across community colleges, four-year universities, and digital public infrastructure. We are building the workforce California’s statutes have authorized, the documented evidence supports, and the world needs.
Continue the Conversation
We are building the workforce California’s statutes have authorized, the documented evidence supports, and the world needs. We invite you to engage with this work at the depth that fits your interest.
Contact us to learn more about the consortium, to request any of these documents, or to discuss potential partnership opportunities.
Email: mesanche@humandream.org
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