Minnesota’s COVID-19 Stories of Community Outreach and Partnership

Abstract Information: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Minnesota Department of Health prioritized sharing accurate information with Minnesotans to stay healthy and safe. MDH identified the need to work with trusted community sources to ensure all Minnesotans receive critical information in a timely manner, and contracted with trusted community-based organizations and diverse media vendors to provide critical information and connect community members to testing, vaccination, and other resources. MDH staff were reassigned to the COVID-19 Cultural, Faith, and Disabilities Communities (CFD) Branch. MDH began the series Stories from the Field to highlight the efforts of its staff and community partners during the COVID-19 response. The stories provided insight into their work, challenges faced, and new and tested strategies used. The session is about how these stories informed the evaluation of the CFD Branch and vice versa, and how they led to unexpected outcomes, including changes in how communication plans are developed within MDH.

Relevance Statement: During the COVID-19 pandemic, the Minnesota Department of Health (MDH) prioritized sharing accurate information with Minnesotans on how to keep themselves and their families safe. MDH identified the need to work with trusted community sources to ensure that all Minnesotans receive critical information in a timely manner, for example, translated health messages with culturally relevant images. MDH contracted with trusted and community-based organizations and diverse media vendors to provide critical information to community members and connect them to testing, vaccination, and other resources. At the same time, staff from across MDH were reassigned to the COVID-19 Cultural, Faith, and Disability Communities (CFD) Branch to help with the public health response. They worked alongside community partners to provide culturally and linguistically responsive COVID-19 guidance and updates to communities most impacted by health inequities across Minnesota, including communities of color and American Indians, LGBTQIA, disability, and faith-based communities. MDH started a series called Stories from the Field to highlight the efforts of staff and community partners during the COVID-19 response. These stories provided insight into how the work is done, challenges they faced, and how COVID-19 has pushed them to try new strategies in order to fulfill MDH’s mission of protecting, maintaining, and improving the health of all Minnesotans. The featured stories helped inform the evaluation of the CFD Branch, particularly the key informant interviews. Subsequently, the interviews also helped to inform future stories in the series. The ideas for the stories came from “conversational touch points” built in into the CFD model. These meant connecting with Community Liaisons, COVID-19 Community Coordinators, contract managers, and community partners in the planning stages. The Stories from the Field led to several unexpected positive outcomes for MDH, for example: they helped increase the awareness of MDH staff, including others who are not part of the CFD Branch, of community engagement; Communication staff used the stories as a gauge and denotation of the equity work being accomplished; and it has led to changes in how communication plans are developed at MDH, including adding layers of reviewers and disseminating information through multiple and often unconventional channels. This sessions will show that in times of public health emergencies, stories are just as important as statistics, and how through evaluation, they can be used to learn how we can do better as we navigate the pandemic, and what lessons we can take from current efforts to inform future emergency response.