Advocating for individuals and communities

The role of advocating for individuals and communities not only includes advocating for the basic needs and resources of communities and entails conducting policy advocacy. This chapter provides two accounts of how CHWs provide advocacy and advocate for their profession. CHWs in Arizona advocated for their communities and their workforce on the state, local, and federal level to address the social determinants of health and structural issues such as poverty, unemployment, the built environment, and discrimination. The first team explores stories of CHWs who have advocated on multiple levels, including organizational and policy levels, and discusses the factors that support and hinder CHW advocacy efforts. The team describes how local and grassroots advocacy efforts ultimately helped to create a CHW workforce sustainability movement and support the statewide CHW professional association, Arizona Community Health Workers Association (AzCHOW), in advocating for voluntary certification on the state level. The second team provides timely information on how CHWs with Enlace Chicago advocated for their communities during COVID-19 to address social determinants of health, including poverty, unemployment, discrimination, and exploitation of worker rights, and provide basic needs. The CHW stories describe how advocacy efforts were instrumental in directing community members to food banks, personal protection equipment, sources of employment and workers' rights, and emergency rental assistance programs. These stories underscore how CHWs were often the only links connecting their community members to what they needed while facilitating the community's understanding to public health guidelines during COVID-19 and addressing mental health needs. © Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2021.

Leveraging customer services technique for organizational and family stability in COVID-19 era: A sociological perspective

This research investigated the extent COVID-19 pandemic affected micro and small businesses that constitutes Nigeria’s critical GDP viability and family relationships, and how the amplification of customer service techniques can stabilize such businesses and hence, promote stability-challenged family relationships. The empirical research applies a qualitative approach and obtains information from 90 respondents on their life and livelihood before and during COVID-19, and explores business and family reconstruction efforts with customer service approach. The data reveal that all respondents are negatively impacted economically and psychologically and lifestyles plunged, a situation that facilitates people’s ingenuity, in absence of meaningful statutory emergency relief assistance. More than before, most respondents established much stronger relationships with their customers during the pandemic, with both sides embracing unavoidable symbiotic business partnerships. Respondents developed customer service ethos of less argument, more empathy, tolerance, smiling and engaging in customers’ business and private events. From the data, the pandemic phenomenon creates an impetus to drive small and micro businesses to sustainability in Nigeria’s young and populous environment with guaranteed customer demand, enhanced revenue and household expendable income. However, catalytic customer service approach needs the complement of public sector driven, secure and informal sector business friendly environment for individual, business, family and national development. © 2022, Association Res Militaris. All rights reserved.