Leveraging the Power of Impact Storytelling to Advance Health Equity and Prevent Chronic Disease

Across the United States, community coalitions have been doing quiet, often unglamorous work, braiding together resources from public health, healthcare, and local organizations to address the conditions that shape whether people live healthy lives. The work is real. The results are real. But for a long time, the knowledge stayed local.

What worked in rural Idaho didn’t make it to metro Atlanta. What advocates in one county had learned the hard way wasn’t available to the coalition two states over starting from scratch. The field was moving, but not together.

The “Getting Further Faster” (GFF) initiative was launched with the specific vision to change that.

The Gap Between Local Action and National Understanding

Public health has long recognized that to prevent chronic disease, the field must address its root causes: social determinants of health (SDOH) – the conditions in which people live, work, and play. What was missing wasn’t evidence that this approach works. What was missing was a shared, accessible record of how communities were actually making it work on the ground.

GFF was designed to surface those strategies and to build the knowledge base around collaborative efforts that impact chronic disease. The initiative is a partnership between CDC’s National Center for Chronic Disease Prevention and Health Promotion (NCCDPHP), the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO), the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), and community-led partnerships across the country. Health+ Studio served as a strategic partner to the initiative for the initiative’s first three years to support GFF in establishing the foundation, building the capacity of GFF coalitions, and launching a community of practice. Fundamentally, our work sought to answer one key question: how can we take deeply local, human stories exploring how collective health and wellbeing is built and turn them into something that teaches, travels, and lasts?

Coaching Communities to Tell Their Own Stories

What excited us most is that GFF’s approach was grounded in a principle that also runs through much of Health+ Studio’s work: the people closest to the challenges also hold the wisdom and expertise for the most effective solutions. The goal was not to extract stories from coalitions and package them for outside audiences. It was to help coalitions find and tell their own stories so that existing knowledge can be preserved and others could learn from them. It was also to build the capacity of the communities so that they could keep doing the work long after the engagement ended.

To support the coalitions’ storytelling efforts, Health+ Studio facilitated deep listening sessions to help each coalition answer foundational questions: What is our core purpose? What data is most compelling? Who needs to hear this? This discovery process was paired with direct communications capacity building, equipping local partnerships with skills and frameworks they could carry forward independently.

Three Years, Three Milestones

The engagement evolved deliberately over three years, each phase building on the last.

In years one and two, the focus was on elevating local knowledge and community voices. Health+ Studio collaborated with coalitions to produce impact-driven videos and print materials designed for multiple uses — from community education to fundraising. By organizing these stories into key domains of social determinants of health, including food security, social connectedness, and the built environment, the team began to surface common threads running across geographically and demographically distinct communities.

In year three, the work zoomed out. Health+ developed a four-part video series designed to explain why addressing social determinants of health matters and the critical role local public health departments play in designing effective strategies. This series served as a bridge — connecting the specific successes of individual grantees to the broader case for government investment in community-level SDOH work.

A Knowledge Base, Not Just an Archive

The materials produced across three years became resources for the GFF Community of Practice, a peer-learning community that aims to open these insights to a much wider audience and spread the model of building local multi-sector partnerships to communities across the nation.

The feedback from coalitions pointed to something beyond the materials themselves. The collaborative process of developing core messages supported buy-in and strengthened coalitions’ efforts, giving participants language to describe their work and prompting closer examination of what they were actually trying to accomplish. The process of storytelling, in other words, sharpened the work itself.