By Gabbi Santeiro
For many communities around the United States, improving public health begins with the flow of accurate public health information. The problem, according to Brown University instructor and longtime journalist Stefanie Friedhoff, is that flow is often disrupted by bad actors and outdated communication practices. The result: accurate information is not free or accessible. There is, however, a solution.
In her keynote speech at the 2024 State of the Public’s Health Conference held in Athens, Georgia, on Thursday, Oct. 24, Friedhoff suggested that public health communications should center communities in the spread of information. During Friedhoff’s speech, the audience was presented with a community-based approach that can guide their communication with others during a modern “information crisis.”
“We cannot, and should not, try to control the message,” Friedhoff said to the conference crowd assembled at the Georgia Center for Continuing Education. “We should try to build relationship[s].”
Friedhoff’s expertise in community-based public health communications transcends her role as a journalist and an instructor. In 2022, she co-founded Brown University’s Information Futures Lab, which addresses barriers to accurate information that different communities experience.
A driving point of this speech was that journalists and public health officials often fail to meet people where they are when sharing matters of public health. For example, mistrust regarding the COVID-19 vaccine is particularly common among groups who often have low access to accurate public health information, such as rural and immigrant communities in America.
Friedhoff stated that while this skepticism is often met with judgement, it is more productive to consider the kind of information, and misinformation, members of these communities might be presented with.
In one pilot test, for instance, Friedhoff and her colleagues enlisted trusted members of different Latino communities in South Florida to observe people’s health-related questions. After six weeks, these community members reported unexpected questions, one of which took three journalists two days to find an answer.
Friedhoff concluded that by addressing people’s questions with the help of trusted community members, she and her colleagues could pinpoint deficits in accurate health information that people in different communities face.
Friedhoff’s approach agrees with the idea of storytelling to center community-based public health communication, concurring that public health communications should be a participatory exchange of information rather than a one-way dissemination of facts.
“People want to be heard,” said Friedhoff. “They want to participate, and they want to have a voice.”
