At the height of these efforts, the organization had about 20 community health workers. Community health workers also regularly go door-to-door in Punjabi neighborhoods to offer their services and tell people about upcoming events. This ability to spend time with the people they’re serving and understand their needs is what makes community health workers so valuable, said Andrea Mackey, who oversees a community health worker coalition on behalf of the California Pan-Ethnic Health Network. In fact, community health workers have been shown to improve people’s health, lower health care costs, and reduce health disparities. But what we do as community health workers is really listen to the community members, take our time, and build that trust.”California has around 8,700 community health workers, according to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, although Mackey says that’s likely an undercount because not all people doing the work classify themselves as such.