Upcoming Discussion on Health Literacy Coalitions

Hello Everyone,

Please join us for an online discussion about Health Literacy Coalitions! Many, but not all, of the current health literacy coalitions have strong partners in adult education. I would very much like to encourage more of this. So I hope that some of you will join us, learn about how your program can fit into a state or regional health literacy coalition, and encourage your local health agencies to include you in their health literacy efforts.

Please Note: This formal guest discussion will be happening on the IHA Health Literacy Discussion List, which you can join at the link below. It is not happening here on the LINCS Community, BUT I hope that our members here will add your thoughts to this thread!

As health literacy grows to be a bigger part of local efforts to improve healthcare delivery, many states and regions are forming health literacy coalitions. The purpose is to bring together a wide variety of stakeholders who can work together to improve health literacy in their communities. This will, in turn, foster better engagement, clearer communication and better service to the public, including the hard-to-reach populations.

There are now over 20 statewide or regional health literacy coalitions, and the number is growing every year. Some of these have been operating for many years, and others are just starting out. The purpose of this discussion is to share information about creating and maintaining a successful health literacy coalition. We will talk about the different structures of existing coalitions, and get advice from those with years of experience. 

• How can a new coalition find funding to get started and then become sustainable? 
• What partners should you reach out to and how? 
• What are the benefits and challenges of maintaining a coalition? 
• How can different state coalitions work together for mutual support?

Our guests Cynthia Baur and Michele Erikson will lead the discussion and share some valuable information from their years of experience with health literacy coalition building. Cynthia is the Senior Advisor of Health Literacy for the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. She has been involved in nationwide health literacy efforts for many years and has helped nurture the growth of many of the state coalitions. Michele Erikson is the Executive Director of Wisconsin Health Literacy. She helped create one of the first state health literacy coalitions in 2007 and has been mentoring other states ever since.

There will be pre-summit session on HL Coalition Building at the Wisconsin Health Literacy Summit in April. We hope to use your input here to help inform that session, and of course invite you all to attend that, if possible. For details: http://wisconsinliteracy.org/health-literacy/training-conferences/health-literacy-summit.html 

Please mark your calendar and gather your questions! We look forward to sharing information and helping each other with our coalition goals.

Feel free to contact me if you have any questions about joining the list or preparing for this discussion.

All the best,

Julie