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The Afterschool Alliance is pleased to host an original series of webinars for the afterschool community. We bring together practitioners, researchers and afterschool advocates from around the country to share resources and explore the issues that impact your work.

This spring the Building Performance Institute, Inc. (BPI) and Green & Healthy Homes Initiative (GHHI) will introduce the Healthy Home Evaluator (HHE) credential to the nation's home performance, weatherization and healthy housing workforce, with the goal of breaking the link between unhealthy housing and unhealthy families through home performance interventions.

This literature review highlights approaches used among CHW interventions that demonstrated effectiveness in terms of improving service quality, cost-savings, and/or improving health and quality of life outcomes. As CHW interventions are gaining greater recognition as a promising element of healthcare reform, the research summarized is hoped to shine a light on promising practices for implementation in the state of Maine. Given limited research, important elements for replication and the range of outcomes that may be expected are only starting to emerge. Some mixed findings exist that further research by the larger field of researchers may eventually help to illuminate. For example, the central importance of home visiting and other face-to-face interactions was emphasized in the ICER 2013 Report, specifically that 75% of successful CHW models they reviewed along with their expert review team came to consensus on the importance of home visiting. However this is not found consistently to be imperative across subsequent studies for all conditions. With such caveats in mind, the literature does point to models that can be drawn upon that may be relevant for advancing the Maine Community Health Worker Initiative and the pilot CHW programs the Initiative supports.

MedicalResearch.com Interview with: Joy Hsu, MD, MS
Air Pollution and Respiratory Health Branch
Division of Environmental Hazards and Health Effects
National Center for Environmental Health
CDC Atlanta GA 30341

Join the US EPA in the national effort to raise asthma awareness during Asthma Awareness Month. Host activities to educate people in your community about comprehensive asthma management. Download EPA’s Asthma Awareness Month Event Planning Kit featuring new ideas for outreach and awareness activities, tips for working with the media, success stories, and much more.

John E. Snyder, U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, January 2016
This report reviews select health services research findings on Community Health Worker (CHW) utilization that are relevant to U.S. policymakers and considers the key challenges to fully realizing the potential for CHWs to improve health care delivery.

Toolkits for safe homes, clean air, healthy lives.

U.S. Senator Kirsten Gillibrand of New York has announced more than $1.6 billion in funding for school districts nationwide to help students manage their asthma.

The California School Environmental Health and Asthma Collaborative (SEHAC) is comprised of government, education and non-profit organizations assembled to increase the K–12 school community's awareness of the importance of addressing indoor air quality and asthma issues. To serve your needs, we've developed Asthma QuickTakes, a series of 3- to 5-minute training videos on asthma, created specifically for schools.

Childhood asthma rates appear to have stopped rising among many U.S. groups, but not among the poorest kids or children aged 10 and older, a study by Lara J. Akinbami, Alan E. Simon, and Lauren M. Rossen suggests.