Lessons Learned From Community Workers Beat the Virus, a Multimedia Campaign Cocreated With Trusted Community Leaders

Communicating effectively with racial and ethnic minorities who are disproportionally impacted by COVID-19 continues to challenge health communication professionals. Racism, historical traumas, and systematic discrimination have long deteriorated African Americans' and Latinos' trust toward the government and medical community.1 The spread of misinformation about vaccination and testing further augments these challenges.2Despite these obstacles, health communication strategies that are leveraged to better engage with underresourced populations hold promise. These strategies include involving community members to share their perceptions, presenting trusted influencers' experiences through appropriate media channels, designing tailored messages for diverse populations, and adopting an empathic and compassionate style in messages.3 Indeed, communication with these strategies in mind continues to drive the core of public health actions.4The Rapid Acceleration of DiagnosticsUnderserved Populations (RADx-UP) Kansas project is an academic-community partnership with the goal of improving COVID-19 testing and vaccination rates in underresourced communities in 10 rural and urban Kansas counties. Our team identified a gap in communicating and engaging these communities. We worked with community leaders and community consultants (n = 26) to codevelop, codisseminate, and evaluate the multilingual, multimedia campaign Community Workers Beat the Virus with the goal of debunking myths vis-a-vis COVID-19 testing and vaccination, providing reliable information, and promoting COVID-19 mitigating behaviors. The motivation behind the campaign first emerged organically from a town hall in early 2020 attended by community health workers, local coalition leaders, and RADx-UP Kansas team members.At the town hall, community health workers-most of whom were personally impacted by the pandemic-expressed their frustration over a lack of credible culturally and linguistically tailored health messaging that directly spoke to the needs of the underresourced populations they served. Here we describe the campaign and provide a roadmap for engaging with community stakeholders to codevelop health messaging in response to future public health emergencies and crises.