AmeriCorps Background
AmeriCorps, the federal agency for volunteerism and national service, provides opportunities for Americans to serve their country domestically, address the nation’s most pressing challenges, improve lives and communities, and strengthen civic engagement. The agency places more than 250,000 AmeriCorps members and AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers in intensive service roles each year. It empowers millions to serve as long-term, short-term, or one-time volunteers. Learn more at AmeriCorps.gov.
Public Health AmeriCorps
AmeriCorps and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention joined forces to launch Public Health AmeriCorps and support the recruitment, training, and development of the next generation of public health leaders ready to respond to the nation’s public health needs. The COVID-19 pandemic has underscored the urgent need to further enhance public health resources across the country. This effort starts with investing in a future workforce to help local communities respond to and recover from COVID-19. Public Health AmeriCorps has two main goals:
- Address public health needs of local communities by providing support in state and local public health settings and advancing more equitable health outcomes for underserved communities.
- Create pathways to quality public health-related careers through onsite experience and training, focusing on recruiting AmeriCorps members who reflect the communities in which they will serve.
Mason Data and Technology Driven Public Health AmeriCorps Training Program
We focus on recruiting AmeriCorps members with a diverse range of lived experiences who come from communities like the ones in which you will serve. Adults of all ages and educational backgrounds qualify to serve in Public Health AmeriCorps. Have you ever considered a public health career?
You could be eligible if you are in a degree program at a Community College or University. We welcome both undergraduate and graduate-level students. You will participate in the Public Health Informatics Training (PHIT) Program at Mason. You will work in interprofessional teams addressing community connections and learn how to use data exchange and analytics to improve care communication, care coordination, triage, and patient surveillance across communities in Northern Virginia.
PHIT at Mason will partner with health departments, nonprofits, and community-based organizations to improve health and social care connections making them better prepared for public health careers. Advancing a community’s health has to be local and tailored, requiring new ways of addressing equitable access to care. The Public health informatics field has been dynamically growing over the past decades. The added lessons learned from the recent COVID-19 pandemic have highlighted the widespread health inequities and inadequacies in public health informatics infrastructure (human and technical). Public Health Informatics is not simply the application of computers in public health. Still, it requires a deep understanding of nuances within information systems and data, the need to be embedded in the communities we serve, and the efforts of state and local health departments and their community partners to improve health for all.
During this 1-year program, you will be provided enhanced public health training and guidance and support on career pathways through our Life After AmeriCorps training modules. This is in addition to the onsite training Public Health AmeriCorps members will receive from George Mason University. Members will provide services for underserved populations during a 12-month fellowship which will include 15 hours a week of direct program work and 2.5 hours a week of classroom learning for a total of 900 hours. You will learn to identify and capture the data, remember to stratify patients’ risk levels within various categories (social need, chronic disease, mental and substance abuse risk, etc.), and connect patients to appropriate specialty health and social service partners. As you gain experience, you will have the opportunity for increasingly complex data-specific tasks from data collection to data organization, modeling, and analytics focused on specific task outcomes; collecting of individual level high needs patients’ data; and social media data mining.
This can be a stepping stone into permanent jobs in the public health field!