On today's episode, ASTHO Director of Infrastructure Communications Elise Moore explores a growing trend in grant funding: community impact statements, and how they explain not just what public health agencies are doing, but why it matters.
In a crowded funding environment, telling your story clearly isn’t extra work; it’s essential infrastructure. ASTHO Director of Infrastructure Communications Elise Moore explores a growing trend in grant funding: community impact statements, and why they’re becoming essential. At their core, these statements are simple: a clear, concise way to explain not just what public health agencies are doing, but why it matters. But as Moore explains, that shift from describing activities to demonstrating real-world impact can make the difference between securing funding and being overlooked.
From Workplan to Why: Crafting Meaningful Community Impact Statements | ASTHO
Public Health Communications for Impact: Approaches to Strengthening Infrastructure
JOHN SHEEHAN:
This is Public Health Review Morning Edition for Thursday, May 7, 2026. I'm John Sheehan with news from the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
Today, we discuss the power of a strong impact statement. In a crowded funding environment, telling your story clearly isn't extra work, it's essential infrastructure. ASTHO Senior Analyst Elise Moore will tell us about a growing trend in grant funding, community impact statements, and why they're becoming essential. At their core, these statements are simple: a clear, concise way to explain not just what public health agencies are doing, but why it matters.
ELISE MOORE:
We're seeing community impact statements come up more and more, especially as grants are evolving and placing a greater emphasis on demonstrating the community impact. So, they're being requested in things like grant progress reports, work plans, quick wins, highlights, to name a few. And so the statements themselves aren't a new concept. They're essentially an elevator pitch to describe your work and how it relates to healthy communities. What makes them so important is that they're going beyond describing the specific activity and helping articulate why the work matters and what communities are gaining from strong, well-supported public health systems. And so, community impact statements are a way to really connect the day-to-day work to the bigger picture and making often invisible work of a functioning public health system more visible. And so, they really help make sure public health work is understood by a broader audience, so leadership, policymakers, and funders like that.
SHEEHAN:
And can you connect the dots for us, why it's worthwhile for an agency to put in that extra care to go ahead and make clear what they're planning to do with the money and why it's good to clarify that for the grant funder?
MOORE:
Yeah. So, it's showing up, as I mentioned, kind of more in grant reporting requirements from funders. So, it is worth taking the time to practice and have some more impact statements under your belt that are developed and can be easily included in communications. So, we know public health professionals have a lot on their plate. And sometimes, going that extra step of explaining why their work matters can get pushed to the back burner to when they might have more time or when the project wraps up. But we just want to emphasize that it's important to highlight your public health work as it's happening and not just at the end. And so, creating these community impact statements along the way, while you're working on a project, really helps make your work more visible and helps to build the buy-in to sustain it, especially if you want similar work to continue after and beyond a specific grant period. And so the good news about drafting community impact statements is that they really don't take very long to write. It's only a few minutes where you can take a work plan activity and translate that into a community impact statement. And then once you have that, you can use it in reports, presentations, external communications to make that more compelling. And so it can end up saving you time in the long run. And so, building community impact statements into your workflow really helps ensure that your work is getting recognized, that it's being understood, and that leadership, partners, policymakers, community members are really seeing its value. And at the end of the day, you're communicating in a digestible way why the work you're pursuing on a public health initiative is important and what it means to the communities you serve.
SHEEHAN:
And you cite one example of a jurisdiction that use a method called the Five Whys. What is that? Walk it through it for us.
MOORE:
Yeah. So, the "Five Whys," the "Five Whys" method is a simple tool for identifying the root cause of a problem. So, you start by stating the issue or work you pursued, and you just keep asking why until you reach the underlying reason. So, it helps push a team past the surface issue and helps them get more specific about what's really driving the work, which is really helpful when you're creating community impact statements because for impact statements, specificity is really key. And so when you're breaking down the root cause of why an initiative was pursued, it becomes easier to articulate the value of the work and the importance of the processes that often operate behind the scenes. So, an exercise like the "Five Whys" really helps move your team from describing what they did to explaining why it matters and is something that's critical for developing a strong community impact statement because those should really connect that work to the real world community benefit.
SHEEHAN:
Another approach you cite is the "Big Idea" approach, the what plus benefit. What is that and how does it work?
MOORE:
Yeah, so one of the bigger challenges in public health storytelling, specifically infrastructure stories, is that a lot of the infrastructure work is complex and happens behind the scenes. So, because of that, community impact isn't always immediately obvious, which can make it hard for teams to frame their work around community impact. So, in the blog specifically, we share a simple framing device to help teams connect their work more directly to why it matters for their community. And at a high level, that approach combines three pieces. It combines a big idea statement, a ‘why’ statement, and the outcomes. The big idea is where you state what you did and the benefit it delivers. So, a simple structure is, 'To deliver X benefit, we created X initiative.' And after you explain your big idea, you add why you chose to pursue the activity. So, this is something where the "Five Whys" exercise is really helpful because it helps you get past that surface level explanation into the real reason the work matters. The 'why' statement then can become a bridge to the outcomes that you have. It helps clearly explain what changed as a result of the work and why that change is meaningful. The goal really is to frame the community impact statements for someone outside of your day to day work and operations and you want it to be clear, accessible, and grounded in the real world impact and not just internal processes. So, when you put all those components of that framework together into a community impact statement, it helps explain why your health department chose to invest in an initiative and what that investment means for the community and turn something that might have felt technical or invisible into a statement that's relevant and easy to understand and really helps connect the dots between what we do every day in public health and how that work improves people's lives.
SHEEHAN:
In the blog, you also list examples from jurisdictions that have completed these statements, places like Pima County and American Samoa. Was the idea there to give smaller agencies just this resource that shows you like here's one example of a place that did it? You know, think about how this could apply to yours.
MOORE:
Yeah, I think that is one of those things where seeing real examples of how jurisdictions have put together community impact statements and help tell the story of success that they've had is really helpful. Sometimes you just kind of want an example to look at. And so, that is why we cited in the blog some examples, some tangible things that other jurisdictions have done to help share the impact their communities have had. We also have additional examples on phinfrastructure.org, which is the Public Health Infrastructure Grant website. So, folks can go over to that website to access additional resources related to impact statements and read what other jurisdictions have put out related to PHIG.
SHEEHAN:
Well, Elise Moore, thanks so much.
MOORE:
Yeah, thanks, John.
SHEEHAN:
Elise Moore is a Senior Analyst at ASTHO.
Effective communication is not just about messaging. It depends on strong systems, resourcing, and coordination behind the scenes. A new ASTHO webinar on May 21 will explore how public health agencies can strengthen their communications infrastructure to improve reach, effectiveness, and sustainability. Join us for an introduction to the Public Health Communications Collaborative's newly published, 'Overcoming Challenges and Leveraging Strengths Action Guide for Communicators at Public Health Agencies,' which outlines evidence-based strategies for organizing and operating effective public health communications functions. The link to register is in the show notes.
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This has been Public Health Review Morning Edition. I'm John Sheehan for the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials.
