Nevada County Health Department Launches “We Care” Brand to Rebuild Public Trust and Engage with Communities
Success StoriesKathy Cahill, Director of Public Health at the Nevada County Health Department, explains the significance of branding and re-envisioning her department’s identity following COVID-19. Nevada County is an indirect recipient of Public Health Infrastructure Grant (PHIG) funding, but via support from the California Department of Public Health, the department was able to develop a new brand, “We Care,” which encapsulates their commitment to enhanced community outreach and engagement. This branding effort has been about more than logos and graphic design – it’s helping the health department better align their mission, vision, and values with the needs and interests of their rural population. This new approach is designed to reshape public perceptions and foster trust within the communities they serve.
Video Transcript
How Have You Been Able to Use PHIG Funding?
It’s really helped our health department, which is a rural health department with a population of about 100,000, and it’s helped us in a number of ways. I’ll list a couple:
- First, we were able to hire some new people, particularly a Health Equity Coordinator
- We were able to do more development around our internal workforce of public health.
- Third was to help us really establish a better brand for our public health department. And the brand was important because coming out of COVID, there was a lot of dislike and concerns about public health. And so we wanted to change our image.
So those are three areas that we’ve used our resources for, and it’s been very helpful because most of our resources in public health – as most public health people know – are categorical and don’t allow for some of these kinds of things that are really essential to build a workforce, but also to rethink the public health system in our county.
Why is Branding So Important?
We had our, you know, county logos and things like that, but we never really had an identity as a department. We’re working right now on our vision, mission, and values to bring the staff together to kind of rethink our purpose as a public health department. Our brand that we created is called “We Care” and it’s really exciting because it’s got a little heart and little people and different kinds of designs, but it’s really: we care about the community, we care about moms, we care about families. So we use the “We Care” brand to really talk about the communities that we serve.
What’s Next?
So I mentioned we’re going to be working on our mission, vision, and values, which we did about eight or nine years ago, and refreshing those in the context now of, I call it the “post-COVID world.” And in the context of, as we talked about, issues around poverty, living in a rural community, our identity as “We Care,” and trying to figure out ways that we can improve upon our overall health department status and the work we do, expanding some of the work we do in communities and really trying to go where the people are instead of being in our offices. So we’re embarking on a lot of community outreach clinics and events and things like that, where we go with our public health staff and our expertise and provide all kinds of services. But also with that brand, and now with a better understanding, I think, as public health practitioners about the importance of how we’ve come to the to the table, if you will, when we’re meeting with clients and working with our partners.