Johns Hopkins
Bunting Neighborhood Leadership Program
Trainings
Session 1: Trauma-Informed Health Communications 101: Targeting Low-Income Communities of Color
During the session, participants will:
- Increase their awareness and understanding of the worldview and specific cultural and communication dynamics of African-American communities.
- Identify key differences between oral-based and literate-based cultures.
- Gain information and context that enhances empathy for clients who reflect different backgrounds, experiences and worldviews from outreach and other staff at the agencies and programs designed to serve them.
- Enhance their communication and outreach skills with vulnerable populations, including LGBTQ+, through practical, community-tested strategies that not only focus on “what to say,” but also “how to say it.”
- Participate in hands-on, interactive argument/counter-argument exercises to prepare them for an authentic, and ultimately, effective public health dialogue with low-income African-American communities.
- Learn the steps required to develop trauma-informed, culturally relevant messaging and materials, including how to develop messages that include references to stress & trauma, resilience and healing/recovery, so that they resonate with audiences who live in at-risk environments.
- Learn the protective factors that facilitate thriving coping behaviors.
- Engage in discussions and activities to contextualize the experiences and worldviews of vulnerable populations and how they are negatively impacted by stereotypes and misperceptions.
Session #1 will enhance participant’s health communication skills in order to build credibility and trusting relationships with their target audience, increasing both impact and effectiveness. It will feature research-based and community-tested strategies that can be used immediately, even by organizations with resource limitations that narrow the choices of communication channels. Participants will also receive information about how they can strengthen the protective factors that will allow low-income, urban residents to thrive (versus merely survive) in spite of the challenging realities of their lives.
Session #2: Community Engagement Concepts That Counter Trauma, Disparities and Lack of Trust
This session builds off the learnings from Session #1 with an overview of MEE’s culturally-relevant community outreach and mobilization strategies. We will provide a deeper understanding of the importance of community mobilization and highlight how community-based organizations, non-profits and community opinion leaders can be an effective public health communications channel that competes with traditional media.
MEE has developed three (3) community-activation models that have been tested and proven over more than two decades of experience in urban and underserved communities. What all three organically developed, evidence-based models have in common is that they are “bottom up” rather than “top down” approaches to engaging communities. They are also trauma-informed, reflecting the often-harsh economic and social realities of underserved populations. Finally, the models are not adopted from mainstream interventions and they extensively involve the target audience in their development and implementation.
During the session, participants will:
- Learn why using a network of community partners as a non-traditional message-delivery channel can be more culturally-relevant and cost-effective than mainstream media.
- Learn how to effectively engage and mobilize members of the community for community-wide dialogue by involving numerous access touch-points.
- Discuss the negative experiences vulnerable populations have encountered with public health institutions, including medical institutions/universities and schools of public health.
- Understand the importance of community input and participation in heath-promotions activities.
Session #2 will teach how the public health community, in partnership with community opinion leaders/stakeholders, community-based organizations, non-profits, faith-based institutions and the key community gatekeepers can engage and persuade even the hardest-to-reach audiences. This will enable providers to effectively learn about and respond to the needs of their communities. The presenter will explain how grassroots strategies that build a cadre of community partners committed to supporting behavioral health for all can be leveraged to bring community residents who don’t trust governmental or health organizations to the table. As a result of this session, participants will demonstrate enhanced community engagement and mobilization skills that build trust, creates social fabric and leave skills in the community.
Session #3: Primary Research and Other Data Collection with Skeptical and Suspicious Audiences
This session builds off the learnings from Session #2 and explores the first phase of MEE’s “by-and-for” philosophy for developing public health communications—formative audience research. It provides an overview of MEE’s audience research approach, which incorporates data-gathering and communications research as the foundation for every major behavioral health intervention. The session will illuminate how to properly and respectfully execute audience research, in a way that can help internal/external creative teams determine the motivation and persuasion techniques that best reach and influence any target population. The session will cover a multi-layered research approach that includes quantitative data collection, literature reviews and expert interviews, resulting in highly accurate research findings and reports. It will also address how video summaries that use firsthand accounts and stories from the target audience can graphically illustrate the research findings and allow clients to see and hear what the target audience is thinking.
During the session, participants will:
- Learn how conducting audience research is integral to affecting behavioral changes and can inform a public health communications campaign.
- Learn MEE’s proven approach to executing effective audience research and the different types of audience research conducted by MEE, and also what makes MEE’s process unique.
- Identify and define the barriers, arguments and counter-arguments related to helping communities of color improve their health outcomes.
- Discuss and assess how audience research informs message and materials development.
Session #3 will address the steps to conduct primary audience research among populations who have had negative experiences with public health institutions, including medical universities and schools of public health, leading to suspicion, anger and mistrust. A number of data-collection methods, both quantitative and qualitative, will be explained, with the goal of helping participants elicit accurate and authentic responses from their target audiences. Strategies that meet a range of resource allocations will be demonstrated. The session will also address effective recruitment strategies for research subjects, including involving a broad cross-section of grassroots, community-based organizations to gain credible access to vulnerable and suspicious audiences. Data coding and analysis processes that include individuals who reflect the demographics of the target audience will be explained.