The Cook County Department of Public Health recently debuted the “Public Health Heroes League,” an animated graphic novel campaign that aims to educate the public on the resources the department provides. On their website, viewers are drawn to an array of characters mirroring diversity in the Department of Health. Only these heroes aren’t dressed in capes adorned with shiny armor, but depict everyday heroes — wearing lab coats, scrubs and suits. POLITICO spoke with Dr. LaMar Hasbrouck, the COO at the CCDPH, to learn more about the campaign. Here's some of the conversation, edited for length and clarity. What’s your main goal with the Public Health Heroes League campaign? What I want to see is a transformation of the knowledge level and understanding of what we do — but also an engagement with us because we have a lot of tools to reach out to folks in various ways. We want to build relationships outside of chaos, outside of outbreaks, outside of catastrophe. So, when there’s an outbreak, we have a good relationship, we can move at speed — and most importantly — we have the trust. It’s a fun way to introduce ourselves to the community, and it's really meant to be kind of an evergreen campaign to make sure folks understand we’re here. How did you and your team pick which issues to tackle, and will others be addressed? We drafted about 12 different scenarios. We ended up producing three of them, one being the introduction to the characters and then two others on tobacco and measles. We chose them based on the criteria of what could be an easily translatable story in a very short vignette and what would folks resonate with or react to, while showing the spectrum of the diversity of things we do. Because of time and resources, we were only able to develop three, but we hope to develop more going forward. Why was it important for diversity to be represented in the campaign? We pride ourselves as having one of the most diverse health departments in the country. About 40 percent of our staff are Black, Indigenous and people of color. The national benchmark is about 18 percent. We wanted to make sure we reflected the diversity of our staff and the residents we serve. And we also wanted to make the point that there is excellence through diversity. The creativity just kind of came together because we understand that folks seem to be captivated by action characters. How can programs like yours fight health inequities in Black and brown communities? Well, it starts with trust. If you're not a trusted messenger, service provider or public servant, then whatever you have in your bag of tools is not going to work because there'll be skepticism. We saw a lot of that with vaccine hesitancy and other things in the community. It also starts with authentic and sustained engagement with the people you're serving. Humility is very important because we have a level of expertise, but the community residents have a different level of expertise: their lived experience. We have to leverage both of those. And we have some restoration to do, given our history of not being as engaged and as not being as involved with the community.
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