What is Behavioral Health Communications?

• The Health Communications Model Overview: Sender | Message | Channel | Receiver
• MEE’s Approach to Behavioral Health Communications – Flipping the Model (Right to Left)
• Starting with the Receiver and the Worldview of the Receiver
• Understanding the Importance of Oral Communications Culture (OCC) to the Receiver

Even though many people now spend hours of each day in front of screens, using their smartphone or online platforms, interpersonal dialogue with peers and others within their social networks is what leads to sustainable behavior-change. Therefore, these days, funded providers, NGOs, non-profits, health practitioners, health departments and behavioral-health agencies must use a combination of digital outreach (high-tech) and on-the-ground encounters (high-touch) to interact persuasively with the low-income communities they serve and hope to engage. Now, the latest technology, whether it is a website, mobile app or a social media platform (and digital still must be culturally-relevant), needs to be paired with what MEE calls “human-ology”—interpersonal (virtual or face-to face) interactions with members of a community.

• Online (Technology) vs. Offline (Human-ology) Channels
• Introduction to “Community as a Channel”
• Message Development that Engages Communities, including Embedding Effective Counter-Arguments to Barriers, Suspicions and Fears
• Balanced Community-Engagement Messaging that Refers Not Only to Stress & Trauma (Risks), But Also to Resilience, Healing and Recovery (Strengths)

• Increase their awareness and understanding of the worldview and specific cultural and communication dynamics of low-income communities of color facing the highest health disparities.
• Identify key differences between oral-based and literate-based cultures.
• Understand the importance of “context” and how including it in message development creates/builds trusting relationships with clients who reflect different backgrounds, experiences and worldviews from outreach and other staff at the providers, agencies and programs designed to serve historically mistreated communities.
• Enhance participants’ communication and outreach skills with vulnerable populations, including low-income BIPOC and LGBTQ+ of color, 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 providers for an authentic, and ultimately, effective behavior-change dialogue with families living in marginalized and vulnerable communities.
• Learn the steps required to develop trauma-informed, culturally relevant messaging and materials, including how to develop messages that embed references to stress & trauma, resilience and healing/recovery, so that they resonate with families and community leaders who live in at-risk environments.
• Practice how to present street-credible, authentic and culturally relevant information in such a way that lifestyle changes are sustainable in the context of busy, economically-challenged and stressed-out lives.
• Learn the protective factors that facilitate thriving coping behaviors and “upstream” primary prevention.

• Overview of MEE’s culturally-relevant community outreach and mobilization strategies.
• Learn why and how to effectively engage community leaders in order to mobilize residents for community-wide dialogue by involving and leveraging numerous access touchpoints.
• Discuss the negative experiences vulnerable populations have encountered with mainstream institutions (including human-services providers) and how community engagement can work to counter trauma, disparities and lack of trust.
• A demonstration of how community-engagement models are not just inclusive, but also support long-term sustainability, by creating trusted relationships with community members, but also increasing their own skills/capacity to improve outcomes into the future.
• Understand how CBOs, non-profits and community/faith leaders can be more culturally-relevant and cost-effective as message senders than mainstream media.
• Understand why community engagement is critical to the behavior change process for oral-based cultures (OCC) and how to facilitate community dialogue by addressing the community’s daily realities and chronic stressors.
• Creating a Community Network as a grassroots, community-centered communications channel.
• Using the Community Network for equipping the community with the tools and skills they need to navigate the system (government agencies).

Every successful MEE campaign has a community-engagement component central to it—we value and prioritize it. MEE’s community-engagement approach and models have been tested and proven over more than three decades of experience in urban and underserved communities. MEE’s three (3) evidence-based models take a “bottom up” rather than “top down” approach to engaging communities. They are also trauma-informed, reflecting the often harsh economic and social realities of underserved populations. Finally, the models are community-developed, not adopted from mainstream interventions; they extensively involve the target audience in their development and implementation.

• Learn why having authentic, on-the-ground community engagement in a public- or behavioral-health professional’s “toolbox” counters a lack of trust in mainstream institutions, even though this approach is often ignored because it is perceived as “too hard” to pull off.
• Learn why using a network of community partners as a message delivery channel can be both more culturally-relevant and cost-effective than mainstream, traditional media.
• Understand why the best use for even the latest digital technology (high-tech) is as a mechanism to drive as many members of hard-to-reach audiences as possible to on-the-ground, community-based encounters (high-touch) where authentic dialogue can take place. A circular framework then allows these audiences to use digital solutions like social media platforms to maintain the established relationship and/or to seek more detailed information as needed.

Providers who gain skills in effective, community engagement will have a blueprint for developing lasting connections that restore and build trust with skeptical residents and address a range of health disparities and inequities (i.e., SUDs) in low-income communities of color. Building this type of credibility increases both impact and effectiveness.

• Gain knowledge about urban America’s unique brand of trauma that low-income, urban and under-resourced boys and men of color (BMOC) are forced to navigate. Health disparities in these communities are characterized by ongoing exposure to high doses of stress and trauma and institutional racism. Urban America’s unique social determinants of health (disparities) includes sustained poverty, regular traumatic episodes like violence in the home and community, criminalization of residents (including police harassment and incarceration), poor public education and even worse housing conditions.
• Gain an understanding of why protective factor interventions should be implemented as “population health” interventions and how taking a trauma-informed approach using community engagement tactics provides better outcomes (cost-effective, culturally-relevant channels) in low-income urban communities.
• Engage in a discussion about why and how some young men of color are not only surviving but are thriving. “Thrivers” are living in the same neighborhoods and exposed to the same social determinants as their peers, but are making different choices, resulting in much healthier mental health outcomes. The discussion will also include “what should be on the horizon” in the field of public health, in order to prevent and reduce mental health issues among young boys and men of color.
• Review case studies, examples and evaluation methods of innovative projects designed to improve the health and life outcomes of boys and men of color in multiple urban and inner-city communities. These include a public-health intervention promoting protective factors and positive and thriving coping strategies, originally developed for the state of Ohio, now being piloted and evaluated in Philadelphia and Columbus.

• 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.
• Engage in discussions and activities to contextualize the experiences and worldviews of people of color and how they are negatively impacted by stereotypes and misperceptions.
• Increase their awareness and understanding of the worldview and specific cultural and interpersonal communication dynamics of people of color.
• Gain tips on how to support people of color in being present in their intimate and family relationships, address struggles related to power and control issues, navigate one’s behavioral and mental health and end domestic violence.
• Participate in hands-on, interactive role exercises to prepare them for an authentic, and ultimately, effective dialogue with communities of color, including African-American men and fathers.
• Learn how to foster safe spaces where men of color can discuss learned masculinity, make sense of their own feelings and support the feelings of others.