The story of Pacific Empire College long predates our founding in 2024.

OUR STORY

Nearly a decade ago, our parent organization Reach Out was called upon by local agencies to develop a curriculum to train and start deploying what was then a nascent occupation: community health workers.

2015

a call to action from our partners

2016 +

hundreds of CHWs trained and deployed

2019

a dedicated occupational working group is formed for CHWs

2020

starting a college: a bold new vision is formed

2024

Pacific Empire College officially launches with BPPE certification

With roots in the Inland Empire – California’s fastest growing and one of most vast, diverse regions – Reach Out and its partners recognized that for many residents, getting access to the care they needed was less often a factor of eligibility than it was a matter of trust and cultural understanding. With a bold vision in mind – one where community members and peer counselors would become the patchwork of a truly human-centered healthcare system – we partnered with health employers, board certified physicians, and experts in community health transformation to design a first-of-it-kind curriculum that would place job-ready community health workers into a broad range of care settings in as little as 12 weeks.

Fast forward several years and Reach Out would go on to employ dozens of its own community health workers to promote health literacy and expand health equity, while also being contracted by several government agencies and dozens of community based organizations looking to deploy CHWs on their own front lines. Entrusting Reach Out with their personnel, our parent organization Reach Out – PEC’s birthplace – has since trained hundreds of community health workers using one of the most robust, continually-improved curriculums available today.

With its compounding knowledge of the CHW role and a finger on the pulse of the profession’s continuing evolution, the Inland Health Professions Consortium – a department of Reach Out focused on building California’s health workforce – eventually launched a cross-sectoral CHW occupational committee, entirely focused on identifying new ways to embed CHWs into the health system to expand health access, improve patient outcomes, and accelerate one of the most accessible, rewarding, and spring-boarding health occupations in existence today.

With time and increasing recognition of the importance of the CHW role both as a driver of health outcomes and of economic mobility for those looking to enter the healthcare profession, in 2020, our Executive Director set forth a bold vision: to go beyond solely programatic training and instead incubate a certified collegiate institution within Reach Out to advance the CHW occupation dramatically.

By forming a college that would offer flexible and state-recognized certifications in exchange for affordable tuition while also contracting with health employers to train their staff, the college would be able to survive independent of reliance upon grant revenue, allowing the institution to invest more time and resources into expanding the curriculum, supporting alumni post-graduation, and advocating for the advancement of the profession in regional health workforce initiatives.

Unlike many training providers, while Reach Out could have continued to offer CHW training as an auxiliary service within its broader portfolio of programs, we recognized that education is one of the most valuable investments one can make, and though it might be easier and provide more autonomy to informally offer our training, seeking certification by the Bureau of Private Postsecondary Education would provide a level of administrative oversight and regulation that would ultimately improve and protect the quality of the training students receive. As such, after a multi-year process of administrative review, Pacific Empire College was officially certified by the BPPE in 2024, allowing us to bring our tested curriculum to even more students, now with the BPPE’s seal of approval.

THE FUTURE

We see the CHW occupation as a limitless one and one that is dramatically under-leveraged in our healthcare system as it stands today.

For that reason, our focus remains sharply on one vision: dramatically accelerating the CHW profession over the next decade, while naturally identifying other auxiliary roles that align with our focus on certificate-based trainings that provide a gateway into financially and emotionally rewarding health occupations. Whether you’re a student or a partner, we are honored to share in this journey with you, and we assure you, without reservation, that this is only just the beginning.