Communicating for Health

Five Years of Progress, Partnership,
& Purpose

We are celebrating this milestone with collaborative reflection, and working each day to strengthen what it means to communicate with and not to our communities for better understanding and better health. 

Public health communicators have complex jobs. With PHCC, you don’t have to do it alone.

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A Letter From Our Director

Where were you five years ago?

Maybe you were on the communications frontlines of the COVID-19 pandemic. Maybe you were a student in a public health master’s program and trying to build meaningful connections with your classmates – but virtually. Or maybe you were on your sixth loaf of sourdough bread, twiddling your thumbs, and wondering if you would be able to safely see your family for the holidays.

Wherever you were, chances are you were navigating a world that was rapidly changing, and public health communications was at the heart of helping people make sense of it all.

Five years ago, I was laser-focused on graduate school applications. At the time, I was considering MBA programs, with a focus on social entrepreneurship. I had been working at the Ad Council for several years and was exposed to the multiplying power of private/public partnerships to advance social impact movements. But then, in the fall of 2020, I was pulled in to help support the COVID-19 Vaccine Education campaign.

Building confidence around the COVID-19 vaccine for hesitant Americans was an eye-opening experience. For hours, I got to listen in on focus groups and individual interviews on the knowledge, attitudes, and barriers surrounding the COVID-19 vaccine. After the COVID-19 Vaccine Education campaign launched in March of 2021, I pulled my business school applications and pivoted my graduate school focus to pursue a master’s in public health at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

These last five years have been as groundbreaking for me as they have been for PHCC. It’s like we’ve been growing parallel alongside each other, and in 2024, our paths crossed, and we bravely took that next step into the future of public health communications. Like PHCC, I’m continuing to grow, listen, and learn.

Five years ago, PHCC’s founding partners—the de Beaumont Foundation, Trust for America’s Health, and the CDC Foundation—took that bold but necessary step to organize what would become the largest collaborative of governmental public health communicators. Since August of 2020, we’ve grown into a beautiful collective of 40,000+ public health communicators hailing from all corners of public health communications. Thank you for helping us shape what PHCC is and can be. We could not do this work without you.

As we mark our 5th anniversary, we carry forward the same commitment that launched this collaborative: public health communicators have complex jobs, but with PHCC, you don’t have to do it alone.

With Gratitude,

Amanda Kwong, MPH