Background/Purpose: As H.R. 1 threatens significant Medicaid and ACA cuts, low-income and immigrant communities in Colorado face compounding barriers to maintaining health coverage: language access gaps, institutional distrust, and rapidly shifting eligibility rules. Safety-net clinics serving these populations need outreach models that can meet communities where they are; in trusted settings, in their language, with accurate information, rather than waiting for community members to navigate complex systems alone.
Methods: Doctors Care, a free safety-net clinic in the Denver metro area, developed a structured Community Ambassador program delivered through subcontracted community-based organizations using a promotora model. Ambassadors are recruited from within the communities they serve and trained using bilingual curriculum materials covering Colorado's health coverage landscape, referral consent workflows, and plain-language responses to emerging community concerns, including federal data-sharing proposals affecting Medicaid and Cover All Coloradans enrollees. Education sessions are conducted in trusted settings including the Mexican Consulate's Ventanilla de Salud program.
Results: Program implementation is ongoing. Qualitative outcomes include increased community awareness of coverage options, strengthened referral pathways between community settings and clinic-based coverage specialists, and ambassador capacity to provide accurate, non-alarmist information on data privacy questions that are actively deterring enrollment.
Implications: Safety-net organizations can build resilient, equity-centered outreach infrastructure by investing in trusted community members as health coverage navigators. This session will equip attendees to describe a replicable ambassador referral model, identify curriculum components for training trusted messengers, and explain how to address data privacy concerns with plain-language health coverage information. In a volatile policy environment, community relationships are both the strategy and the buffer.
