Toolkits and templates

A Guide to Deliverables: AI governance tools for government, by government

• To this end, our members have worked diligently to create a suite of policy templates and knowledge-sharing tools that any public agency can use to jumpstart their own AI governance program. This includes:
  • Template AI Policy and AI Policy Manual to present to your agency’s leadership
  • Template AI Incident Response Plan for the next generation of security risks
  • AI FactSheet and Vendor Agreement template to ensure we are buying responsible AI tools
  • A growing repository of guides for AI use cases being tested by other agencies
  • A growing Vendor Registry of AI systems available for government use
• These documents and repositories are by practitioners, for practitioners to serve our communities better through responsible AI.
• We invite policymakers to borrow, edit, and adopt these templates for their own use. This guide is intended to help practitioners quickly understand, adopt, and implement the policy templates created by the Coalition. In return, we ask that you share your feedback and continue the Coalition’s conversation around responsible AI governance

AI County Compass: A Comprehensive Toolkit for Local Governance and Implementation of Artificial Intelligence

• The goal of this report and toolkit is to enable county government to recognize low-risk versus high-risk implementations of artificial intelligence and generative artificial intelligence and address the challenges that both bring to local government. This report represents the cumulative discussions and contributions of various county leaders across the country – from all geographies, stripes, and perspectives – and we hope it will provide you with a framework for approaching generative artificial intelligence. You will also find more in-depth information and valuable resources on the NACo.org website.

How to start governing & using AI

• This overview provides guidance on how to start using AI.

Interim Guidelines for Purposeful and Responsible Use of Generative Artificial Intelligence (AI) in Washington State Government

• The rapid advancement of generative artificial intelligence (AI) has the potential to transform government business processes, changing how state employees perform their work and ultimately improving government efficiency. These technologies also pose new and challenging considerations for implementation. These guidelines are meant to encourage purposeful and responsible use of generative AI to foster public trust, support business outcomes, and ensure the ethical, transparent, accountable, and responsible implementation of this technology. This document serves as an initial framework for the responsible and ethical use of generative AI technologies within the Washington state government. Recognizing the rapidly evolving nature of AI, these guidelines will be periodically reviewed and updated to align with emerging technologies, challenges, and use cases.

National Institute of Standards and Technology Artificial Intelligence Risk Management Framework Playbook

• The Playbook provides suggested actions for achieving the outcomes laid out in the AI Risk Management Framework (AI RMF) Core (Tables 1 – 4 in AI RMF 1.0). Suggestions are aligned to each sub-category within the four AI RMF functions (Govern, Map, Measure, Manage).
• The Playbook is neither a checklist nor set of steps to be followed in its entirety.
• Playbook suggestions are voluntary. Organizations may utilize this information by borrowing as many – or as few – suggestions as apply to their industry use case or interests.

State government use of Artificial Intelligence

• State governments in the U.S. are actively developing policies and frameworks to manage and utilize artificial intelligence (AI) across various sectors. Key trends include establishing governance structures, enhancing transparency, and addressing ethical concerns.

The American Hospital Association’s Community Health Assessment Toolkit 

• This toolkit provides a nine-step guide for hospitals and health systems to collaborate with their communities and strategic partners to conduct a community health assessment (CHA) and meet community health needs assessment (CHNA) requirements. 

Cardiff Model Toolkit: Community Guidance for Violence Prevention 

• The Cardiff Violence Prevention Model provides a way for communities to gain a clearer picture about where violence is occurring by combining and mapping both hospital and police data on violence. But more than just an approach to map and understand violence, the Cardiff Model provides a straightforward framework for hospitals, law enforcement agencies, public health agencies, community groups, and others interested in violence prevention to work together and develop collaborative violence prevention strategies.

Health People 2030 and MAPP 2.0

• The public health community can prepare to address health inequities by using tools, resources, and processes such as Healthy People and Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships (MAPP). Healthy People 2030 is the current Healthy People initiative from the HHS Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion. It brings a renewed focus on the nation’s health and wellbeing through “upstream” actions that address the social determinants of health (SDOH). MAPP 2.0 is the updated version of MAPP from the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO). This community driven strategic planning process for community health improvement (CHI) spurs collective action to improve population health and equity. To help address SDOH and advance health equity, NACCHO partnered with the HHS Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion to develop this guide on using Healthy People 2030 objectives and targets at the local level in CHI. This guide provides a structure for strategic alignment of MAPP and Healthy People 2030 to assist local health departments and their communities to shift CHI upstream.

Public Health Modernization: Strengthening Collaboration between Public Health and the Health Care System

• A new toolkit released by the National Academy for State Health Policy takes lessons learned from the pandemic and synthesizes them into a comprehensive framework for modernizing public health.
• The toolkit provides a menu of strategies and innovative practices for aligning public health and broader healthcare system efforts – starting with strategies for high-burden, high-cost health conditions that are priorities for both sectors.

Accessible Social Media for Public Health

• Up to 27% of adults in the United States have some type of disability (CDC). Disability can affect mobility, cognition, hearing, vision, and levels of independence and self-care. To create inclusive and accessible public health communications, you must consider the ways people with disabilities will interact with your content. It is not possible for people to understand the important health information you are sharing if they cannot access it.
• While there are considerations for accessibility for every communication channel, this guide will focus on social media. Use the following information to develop accessible writing, visuals, audio, and video that will connect with all members of your audience.

A Community Toolkit for Addressing Health Misinformation

• Health misinformation is causing harm to individuals and to communities, but talking to one another about its impact can help slow the spread by prompting us to think twice about the information we're reading and sharing. This toolkit will help you get started.

Avian Influenza Communication Resources

• CDC’s avian influenza (bird flu) materials are available to assist partners in communicating about bird flu prevention. This digital toolkit includes sample social media, print ready materials, and web assets.

Branding Resource Guide for Health Departments

• ASTHO's Branding Resource Guide helps health departments as they embark on strategic planning, quality improvement, and exploring how best to position their agency. A robust brand enhances visibility in the community and can greatly impact how the public, policymakers, funders, and other key stakeholders view the agency.

• This guide introduces the basic facets of brand development, outlining the path to fortifying a more resilient health department brand. It breaks down the brand enhancement journey into understandable and manageable steps. This guide will be continuously updated to reflect new information as it becomes available.

CDC Clear Communication Index

• The Clear Communication Index (Index) provides a set of research-based criteria to develop and assess public communication products. The Index supports the efforts of the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to comply with the Plain Writing Act of 2010 and achieve goals outlined in the National Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy and the CDC Action Plan to Improve Health Literacy. The 20 items in the Index build on and expand plain language techniques described in the Federal Plain Language Guidelines.

Center for Rural Health's Communication Toolkit

• Welcome to the University of North Dakota Center for Rural Health's online Communication Toolkit. This toolkit is designed to help healthcare organizations and facilities tell their stories through branding, media outlets, social media, and other resources.

Communicating with Heart: Centering Empathy and Compassion in Health Communications

• Public health communicators are tasked with creating responsive, expressive, and evidence-based messages that resonate with diverse audiences. Equally important, but often underestimated, is the task of developing messages that are emotionally striking. Communicating with heart, or developing communications that embed principles of empathy and compassion, is essential to developing meaningful and memorable campaign materials.

• To support further incorporation of this communications element, The Public Health Communications Collaborative has created a resource that offers a collection of empathetic communications considerations. The use of these guiding principles will help communicators develop assets that build trust, relationships, and understanding with priority communities. 

Communicating about Public Health: A Toolkit for Public Health Professionals

• People’s limited understanding of public health, politically driven statements by elected officials and commentators, and mis- and disinformation contribute to public distrust of organizations that are working to protect public health. The de Beaumont Foundation created this toolkit to help public health professionals build public health literacy in their communities.
• If you’re a public health professional — no matter what type of organization you work for or what professional role you play — this toolkit is for you! You have an important role in communicating to the public, and that includes making the case for the vital work that you and your colleagues do every day. These research-tested talking points and strategies will be helpful to professional communicators, but they have been designed to be accessible for professionals with little or no communication experience or training.

Communication Planning Guide for Local Health Departments

• A new Communications Planning Guide for Local Health Departments has been designed for local health department staff who are tasked with communicating specific messages to the public or segments of the public. The guide provides a basic framework to use, including questions to consider when developing communications and evaluation strategies. It also includes considerations for how local health department professionals can incorporate health equity, social justice, and accessibility considerations, including health literacy, into their work.

Communication Resources for Academic Public Health

• Effective communication is essential to advancing academic public health, fostering collaboration, and building public trust. This Communication Resources for Academic Public Health document is designed to equip our members and those working in public health with the tools, messaging strategies, and best practices needed to communicate the value of public health clearly and persuasively.

Communications Tool: Strategies for Developing Culturally Driven Public Health Communications

• Recognizing and incorporating the diversity of people’s cultures, values, and beliefs is essential to effectively communicating with multicultural audiences. Through culturally driven communications, public health professionals can prioritize the preferences and perspectives of target audiences and ensure each priority population feels represented within messaging, visuals, and outreach.

• The Public Health Communications Collaborative and HCN co-created “Strategies for Developing Culturally Driven Public Health Communications” to support public health communicators in effectively communicating with multicultural audiences. This guide is divided into three sections – messaging, visuals, and outreach – to support the development of your public health communications. Each section offers strategies and tools to help you create materials that build stronger relationships, increase credibility, and improve health outcomes.

Customizable Public Health Impact Social Media Template

• Social media platforms are one of the key communications tools and channels that public health organizations and teams utilize. Social media posts can offer an accessible, interactive, and effective way to illustrate your organizational impact, build campaign and resource awareness, and promote positive health outcomes in your community. 
• The Public Health Communications Collaborative has created a new customizable carousel template to help you showcase your organization’s public health successes and milestones of 2023 and/or core goals for the year ahead. Use this graphic template and instructional guide to highlight noteworthy organizational, departmental, or team efforts and outcomes for your community members and professional network.

Digital Safety Kit for Public Health

• Online harassment of public health professionals and students is on the rise. Political division during the COVID-19 pandemic has created more risks for people doing health communication and community engagement online. 

• Our kit is designed to help you prevent and reduce the harm of online harassment in public health. Learn how to protect each other and call for more institutional support to address this pressing issue.

Disability Playbook

• At Community Health, we believe inclusive language has the power to cultivate health equity — and to shape the way people think about disability. We developed this playbook to help health communicators write about disability in a way that makes people feel seen, included, and respected. Discover tips to help you navigate tricky questions about disability and language, learn from your audiences, and create materials that reflect their needs and lived experiences.

Engaging Partners in a Virtual Space

• This toolkit focuses on virtual engagement techniques that can improve working relationships between a health agency’s internal staff and external partners. Successful and intentional virtual engagement will improve an agency’s administrative readiness and support efforts to retain public health professionals in the workforce. Readers can expect information beneficial to any virtual meeting or engagement process.

Everyday Words for Public Health Communication

• Everyday Words for Public Health Communication offers expert recommendations from CDC's Health Literacy Council and other agency communicators on how to reduce jargon and improve readers' understanding.
• You can search for public health jargon or plain language words and find alternatives and example sentences.

Harvard T.H. Chan Center for Health Communication Resource Library

• This resource library has toolkits to help you with all of your public health communication needs. From building trust around health content to working with TikTok creators to talk to reporters and so much more!

Health Communication Playbook: Resources to Help You Create Effective Materials

• Health communication can be challenging. This Playbook will make it easier. When you need to communicate with the public about environmental health, you may be dealing with tight deadlines, complex topics, and distracted or confused audiences. So when you spend the time and resources to develop a new product — whether it’s a website for consumers (i.e., non-scientific audiences) or a presentation for policymakers — you want to know it will work. You want to feel confident your material will:

  • Resonate with the right audience
  • Provide the right information
  • Be easy to understand

How to Develop Products for Adults with Intellectual Developmental Disabilities and Extreme Low Literacy: A Product Development Tool

• The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) created this tool to help people develop communication products for adults who have intellectual and developmental disabilities and extreme low literacy (IDD/ELL) and their caregivers. The tool reflects findings from a survey of caregivers of adults with IDD/ELL, lessons learned from audience testing of select COVID-related
  materials for individuals with IDD/ELL, and a review of the research related to increasing access to, use of, and understanding of information by adults with IDD/ELL

Improving Public Health Messaging: Exploring the Reach and Effectiveness of Cancer Prevention Communications

• This report seeks to explore the reasons cancer prevention messaging has often not resonated with its intended audience nor had the effect it was seeking. Uncovering what is not working and why it is not working will help public health communications professionals course correct and create effective cancer messaging that resonates with people and spurs them to take preventive action.

Inclusive Language Playbook: Writing About Disability

• At Communicate Health, we believe inclusive language has the power to cultivate health equity — and to shape the way people think about disability. We developed this playbook to help health communicators write about disability in a way that makes people feel seen, included, and respected. Discover tips to help you navigate tricky questions about disability and language, learn from your audiences, and create materials that reflect their needs and lived experiences.

Media Relations Toolkit for Health Departments

• Integrating media relations strategies into operational frameworks is crucial for fostering meaningful community connections. ASTHO’s Media Relations Toolkit helps health departments craft effective communication strategies and navigate the landscape of media engagement to cultivate a resilient public image among the public, media, policymakers, funders, and stakeholders.

• This toolkit is a foundational resource for establishing robust media relations practices and offers a step-by-step roadmap for successful media engagement and strategic planning. It reflects the latest insights and trends in media relations, ensuring health departments stay ahead in effectively communicating their messages to their audiences.

Plain Language for Public Health

• In this guide, you’ll find plain language principles, simple techniques that can make your communications more accessible, and resources to learn more about plain language. The sections of this guide contain best practices and tools to use before you start writing, when you’re organizing your content, while you’re writing, and when you’re reviewing and testing your communications. The guide ends with additional resources to help you continue to build your plain language communication skills.

Practical playbook for addressing health misinformation

• Misleading rumors, misinformation, and disinformation can make health events more complicated, reduce trust in public health efforts, and lead to negative health impacts. The Practical playbook for addressing health misinformation provides guidance on ways public health and medical professionals can set themselves up for success, make decisions on when they need to act to address misinformation, choose which actions and approaches might be useful to their audiences and information needs, and evaluate how their efforts are working. It also provides tools, templates, and examples to help in these efforts. Although there is no “silver bullet” to solve the problem of public health misinformation, this playbook helps to lay the groundwork for health communicators such as yourself to address the issue.

Social Media Toolkit for Health Departments

• ASTHO’s Social Media Toolkit provides tools to amplify health departments’ reach in the community and elevate its perceived value to the public, policymakers, funders, and other stakeholders.

• This toolkit introduces how to cultivate a strong social media presence and maps out the steps toward fortifying a more resilient online identity. It offers a comprehensive roadmap toward effective social media engagement and planning. In this resource, health departments will find new insights and trends in social media engagement to aid in developing communications strategies and overall strategic planning processes.

The Complete List of Observances for Public Health Communication and Marketing

• Observances present a powerful tool for social marketing, health education, health promotion, and health marketing. Health awareness and action days, weeks, and months provide designated periods of time to raise awareness of, mobilize resources for, and celebrate advancements in important public health topics and issues.
• Incorporating observances into your strategic planning and coordinating your efforts to correspond with relevant observances can potentially expand the reach of your messages and the impact of your activities. 
• This list is designed to be evergreen, and includes:
• • Public health observances
  • Allied health and healthcare observances
  • ​Health and wellness observances
  • Ethnic/cultural heritage and history observances for groups experiencing disparities in health and healthcare

The Public Health Communicators Guide to Misinformation

• The Public Health Communicators Guide to Misinformation, developed by the Public Health Communications Collaborative in partnership with the Infodemiology Training Program, provides insights into the current misinformation landscape and tools to assess risk and determine how to respond.

The Public Health & Information Sharing (PH&IS) Toolkit 

• The Public Health & Information Sharing (PH&IS) Toolkit addresses key concepts regarding public health agencies' authority to collect, use, and share information to prepare and respond to a public health emergency. This toolkit addresses information sharing issues in general and when information sharing involves the workplace or law enforcement. The toolkit's component documents are designed to assist in education, training, and planning activities to prepare for emergencies, as well as to serve as a quick reference resource during an emergency response to an event.

Community-Driven Data and Evaluation Strategies to Transform Power and Place

• Community-Driven Data and Evaluation Strategies to Transform Power and Place is
  designed to support individuals working in community and institutional spaces to
  engage in data collection and evaluation strategies that are led, defined, and
  analyzed by the community itself.

National Association of County and City Health Officials' Immunization Profile Study Report

• NACCHO's Immunization Profile Study assesses immunization capacity at local health departments nationwide, characterizing local activities to control vaccine preventable diseases and identifying challenges and opportunities to strengthen local immunization programs. 

The Data Modernization Planning Toolkit 

• The Data Modernization Planning Toolkit supports Epidemiology and Laboratory Capacity (ELC) for Prevention and Control of Emerging Infectious Diseases recipients in planning data modernization ventures at health departments. It is not an implementation plan, as each jurisdiction’s data modernization projects will differ. Instead, it is a guide to build leadership and partner buy-in for data modernization work and to assist health departments in developing plans that prioritize data modernization activities.

Using Data to Tell Your Community's Story

• This workbook has been created to help you in your health equity work because data is a powerful tool in telling your
  community’s story, and that story is essential to understanding your community’s truth.
• We know that evaluation planning and data collection can be intimidating—so our goal is to help simplify these things,
  offer ways to bring a greater focus on equity in these processes, and help you find ways to involve local residents and
  community members in accurately and effectively telling your community’s story.

CDC's Training Development Tools and Resources

• Have you been tasked with creating a training? Look no further than the CDC's Training Development website which has resources available from needs assessment to evaluation.

Chemical Preparedness for Local Health Department Preparedness and Response Plans

• The Chemical Preparedness Handbook is designed to assist local health departments (LHDs) in creating effective public health emergency preparedness and response plans for low-probability, high-risk chemical incidents. This handbook offers a framework for developing a chemical preparedness plan, including recommended content and key subject areas.
• The handbook emphasizes the importance of interagency coordination and emergency resources in managing low-probability, high-impact chemical incidents that surpass the routine capabilities of standard response agencies like HAZMAT, local EPA, or fire departments. It provides specific guidance on how LHDs can define their roles and responsibilities, in collaboration with external response partners, during major chemical incidents.

Surveillance Resource Center Tools and Toolkits

• This resource includes links to tools and templates developed by specific surveillance programs that may be adapted for use by other programs. This resource includes data sharing agreements, evaluation templates, survey questionnaires, slide sets, software, forms, and toolkits.

Criteria for Selection of High-Performing Indicators: A Checklist to Inform Monitoring and Evaluation

• The checklist includes practice-based criteria to be considered in the selection of indicators
  for use in monitoring and evaluation. The selection of indicators can be a complex, time-consuming task.

Health in All Policies Evaluation Tool for State and Local Health Departments

• State and local health departments are investing in Health in All Policies (HiAP) as a strategy to incorporate health and equity considerations into local decision-making processes. Many health departments have begun incorporating HiAP in their communities and are seeking to evaluate the benefits of investing in this public health practice. To support the development of robust evaluations, the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO), in partnership with the Association of State and Territorial Health Officials (ASTHO) and with funding provided by CDC/ATSDR, developed this HiAP Evaluation Guidance Tool for local and state health departments. This tool uses the seven HiAP implementation strategies and ASTHO’s four implementation phases of HiAP as a framework.

Learning and Growing through Evaluation: Briefs

• Evaluation briefs provide concise updates to the Learning and Growing Guide.

Maternal and Child Health Digital Library Evaluation Toolkit

• The Evaluation Toolkit is designed to help user locate resources to assist in documenting and achieving measurable health outcomes. It consists of three components:

  1. An Evaluation Primer that explains the basics of public health evaluations.
  2. A list of Key Resources for use in the development of evaluations.
  3. A Choose and Use Guide for quickly accessing current evaluations and guides for use as promising practices.

Monitoring Evaluation Accountability and Learning

• MEAL—Monitoring, Evaluation, Accountability and Learning—is a Catholic Relief Services core competency that is pivotal to the design and implementation of high-impact programs.

Partnership Evaluation Guide: Building Productive Relationships Through Evaluation

• This Partnership Evaluation Guide begins by emphasizing evaluation as a pillar of productive partnerships. The second section focuses on the Centers for Disease Control’s Six Step Evaluation Process. This guide will take you through each step of the framework with partnership evaluation as the subject.
• Additionally, each of the six steps concludes with helpful reminders to consider when putting the step into practice. By the end of this guide, you should have everything you need to effectively evaluate your partnerships! The guide concludes with appendices including an evaluation checklist, logic model template, evaluation plan template, ready-to-use partnership effectiveness tool, and resources for both partnership evaluation and general evaluations.

Planting the Seeds for High-Quality Program Evaluation in Public Health

• This textbook is the culmination of a lengthy and extensive journey undertaken by the National Asthma Control Program (NACP). NACP aims to build evaluation capacity within our program and among our partners, including state and local health departments, federal agencies, non-governmental organizations, professional associations, and academic communities.
• NACP is a program within the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and has long demonstrated its commitment to program evaluation. In 2009, we adopted a formal plan to provide comprehensive evaluation support to the asthma programs we fund. Part of this plan included developing a guidance manual that would help asthma program staff members learn as they were doing—learn about the principles and practices of evaluation as they worked alongside stakeholders to plan, implement, and learn from their evaluations.

Western Michigan University Evaluation Checklists

• An evaluation checklist distills and clarifies relevant elements of practitioner experience, theory, principles, and research to support evaluators in their work.
• Evaluation checklists are available on the following topics: managing evaluation, engaging stakeholders, situating the evaluation in context, applying specific evaluation approaches, designing the evaluation, collecting and analyzing data, interpreting evidence, reporting results and promoting use, and evaluating the evaluation (metaevaluation).

Get Ready for Grants Management from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

• A guide for finding and applying to jobs with resources from a variety of health agencies.

Grant Administrative Tools from the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services

• HHS grant administrative tools include sources to look for grant, reporting systems, payment management systems, tracking, and databases.

Grants Management Office Structure Optimization Toolkit

• The Grants Management Office (GMO) Structure Optimization Toolkit was collaboratively developed to assist Health Departments in establishing and maintaining a more centralized GMO to optimize the utilization of federal funding. The purpose of this toolkit is to comprehensively assess the department's current federal grant workload, grant management office staffing requirements, and potential opportunities. Doing so enables efficient allocation of efforts and support among funded programs.
• The primary objective is to centralize critical functions through a comprehensive grants management system led by specialized and well-trained personnel who maintain close communication with program staff. The toolkit also aims to define the transition costs associated with adopting this structure and appropriately distribute the expenses across multiple programs.

National Institutes of Health Sample Applications, Attachments, and Other Documents

• As you learn about grantsmanship and write your own applications and progress reports, examples of how others presented their ideas can help. NIH also provides attachment format examples, sample language, and more resources. 
• With the gracious permission of successful investigators, some NIH institutes have provided samples of funded applications, summary statements, and more. When referencing these examples, it is important to remember:
  • The applications below used the form version and instructions that were in effect at the time of their submission. Forms and instructions change regularly. Read and carefully follow the instructions in your chosen funding opportunity and the Application Guide.
  • The best way to present your science may differ substantially from the approaches used in these examples. Seek feedback on your draft application from mentors and others.
  • Talk to an NIH program officer in your area of science for advice about which grant program would be a good fit for you and the Institute or Center that might be interested in your idea.
  • Samples are not available for all grant programs. Because many programs have common elements, the available samples can still provide helpful information and demonstrate effective ways to present information.

National Institutes of Health: Write Your Application

• The following guidance may assist you in developing a strong application that allows reviewers to better evaluate the science and merit of your proposal. This page provides tips for demonstrating to reviewers and NIH staff the high quality of the personnel involved in your project and documenting resources and institutional support of the project. We provide information for new investigators and foreign applicants, as well.

• Though the advice provided is relevant for all research grants, it is general in nature and geared toward the NIH Research Project (R01). The tips should not replace your organization's internal guidance, specific advice provided by NIH program or grants management staff, or instructions found in the funding opportunity or application guide.

Tips for Applying for a CDC Notice of Funding Opportunity 

• The tips provided on this page can help when applying for a CDC Notice of Funding Opportunity.

Championing Change: A Toolkit for Addressing Vaccine Equity Through Community Mobilization

• This toolkit introduces the power of partnerships and community-based mobilization in addressing vaccine equity. By sharing lessons learned from ASTHO’s flagship Vaccine Equity Project and providing a database of evidence-based tools, this evergreen resource informs state and territorial efforts to advance equity in public health initiatives.

Health Equity Resource Toolkit for State Practitioners Addressing Obesity Disparities

• This document was created to provide examples of strategies and surveillance data that can be used to inform obesity prevention initiatives.

Improving Health Equity through ABCD (Asset-based community development)

• We’ve designed this workbook to support you in your community-driven health equity work. Built on the foundations
  of Asset Based Community Development (ABCD) and DASH, our hope is that this workbook will help simplify and organize
  your work as you build power with others in your own community

Inclusive event design

• This guide is here to support you in creating events that are inclusive and accessible, both for attendees who explicitly request accommodations and those who may not due to perceived stigma. This guide will be a constant work in progress as the world evolves and changes.

Problem Tree Diagram Guide: A Tool for Rooting Equity in Your Work

• To bring equitable change to a system, it is important to address the root cause of the issue. Root cause analysis is a method that allows teams to explore underlying factors that lead to a problem/challenge they are experiencing. This guide provides an overview of the problem tree diagram and step-by-step instructions on how to use the root cause analysis tool to support unpacking underlying factors and inequities related to a problem/challenge being faced.

The Network for Public Health Law’s Micro-Toolkit: Equity Assessment Framework for Public Health Laws and Policies

• A simple, accessible framework to guide users through six steps to assess potential equity implications for a new or existing policy and to help users identify opportunities for improvement and for continued assessment. The micro-toolkit is intended for policymakers and others who lead, shape, or influence policy decisions, without the need for in-depth training or additional resources.

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention: How to develop products for adults with intellectual developmental disabilities and extreme low literacy 

• CDC recently launched a new tool for jurisdictions on How to Develop Products for Adults with Intellectual Developmental Disabilities and Extreme Low Literacy (IDD/ELL). The creators of the tool reviewed research conducted with adults with IDD/ELL and did audience testing with this group and their caregivers. The tool includes a user guide, a score sheet with 27 yes/no questions about materials being developed, and instructions on calculating and interpreting the material’s score. 

Health literacy: Assessment tools and resources

• A portal to technical reports, documents, assessment tools, PowerPoint presentations, websites, videos and links to professional associations that address health literacy.

Health literacy tool shed: A database of health literacy measures

• The Health Literacy Tool Shed is an online database of health literacy measures. The site contains information about measures, including their psychometric properties, based on a review of the peer-reviewed literature.

Health literacy universal precautions toolkit, 2nd edition

• The AHRQ Health Literacy Universal Precautions Toolkit, 2nd edition, can help primary care practices reduce the complexity of health care, increase patient understanding of health information, and enhance support for patients of all health literacy levels.

Measuring skills and experiences related to health literacy

• Different surveys measure people’s literacy, numeracy, and health literacy skills and their experiences with healthcare. You can use these studies for ideas about research and evaluation questions or as benchmarks for your own results.

Personal health literacy measurement tools

• Personal health literacy is the degree to which individuals have the ability to find, understand, and use information and services to inform health-related decisions and actions for themselves and others. AHRQ-funded researchers have developed tools to measure an aspect of personal health literacy—individuals' reading comprehension in a medical context.

5 Strategies to Strengthen Marketing of Local Health Departments with Recruiting Efforts

• The 5 Strategies to Strengthen Marketing of Local Health Department Recruiting Efforts is meant to provide tangible ideas for promoting health departments as a great place to work and getting job openings in front of viable candidates. It provides actionable information, helpful links, and real-world examples from local health departments and private sector recruitment efforts. This was developed at the direction of NACCHO’s Workforce and Leadership Development Workgroup to bring you best practices in attracting the next generation of public health workers.

A Guide to Building a Climate-Ready Rural Workforce

• This guide supports rural LHDs in their efforts to build a climate-ready workforce. Rural LHDs can refer to this guide when building a climate and health program for the first time, or when scaling up their programs to increase their climate response and adaptation capacity. This document provides tiers of program development and staffing activities, from baseline to advanced, for staffing, training, and climate and health program development tailored to rural LHDs.

ASTHO's PH-HERO Workforce Resource Center

• A curated collection of resources to address moral injury, burnout, resilience, and retention for public health agency leaders, supervisors, and team members.

• From ASTHO's Public Health - Hope, Equity, Resilience, and Opportunity (PH-HERO) Initiative, public health agencies now have curated resources at their fingertips to protect, support, connect, and grow the well-being and retention of their workforce. Use the PH-HERO Workforce Resource Center to find tools, recommendations, scholarly literature, and more to take action to care for your workforce.

Grow Your Own Toolkit: A Guide to Implementing Workforce Strategies in Washington State's Rural Health Systems

• Grow Your Own (GYO) workforce development programs are:
  • Long-term strategies to help address the health care workforce shortages in rural communities.
  • Designed to recruit from within the community to strengthen the health care workforce.
• The goal is to create a pathway into rural health facilities through education and training and to provide advancement opportunities among the current workforce. GYO programs ensure that health care providers of all disciplines are well-educated, well-trained, and have enough experience for rural practice.

Knowledge Retention Toolkit for Succession Planning

• This toolkit is designed to capture and retain explicit and tacit knowledge about an individual's position. The intent is to provide a single document that your organization can use to pass along a departing employee's knowledge. Completion of these questions will also provide the components to construct an Onboarding Plan for a particular job position.

Recruitment Toolkit

• The recruitment process has six key steps, and this toolkit is organized into these six areas. Many health departments, especially accredited ones, have spent time on workforce planning (covered in step 1), but haven’t had resources (or regulatory ability) to devote to updating job descriptions (step 2), and haven’t had budget or staff to build recruitment pipelines, conduct recruitment marketing or outreach, or develop an employer brand (step 3). When it comes to selection (step 4), some health departments are restricted by civil service hiring rules, making the hiring process far slower than the private sector (which can result in good candidates giving up on the process). Onboarding–step 5, and crucial for retention–may be challenging in a situation where staff are overburdened or burned out. Evaluation (step 6) helps keep recruitment efforts on track. A seventh step–advocacy–is specific to public health, since we must fiercely advocate for resources to replenish the workforce.

Strategic Planning 

• The Public Health Accreditation Board (PHAB) defines strategic planning as "a disciplined process aimed at producing fundamental decisions and actions that will shape and guide what an organization is, what it does, and why it does what it does. The process of assessing a changing environment to create a vision of the future; determining how the organization fits into the anticipated environment, based on its mission, strengths, and weaknesses; then setting in motion a plan of action to position the organization," with the strategic plan focusing on a range of agency level organizational goals, strategies and objectives, including new initiatives.

• • NACCHO's Performance Improvement team supports the strategic planning capacity of local health departments by providing tailored technical assistance; a wide range of tools, trainings, and other resources, including publications; and opportunities for peer networking and learning.

Template for Charters

• Creating a charter is a worthwhile exercise when forming a workgroup, advisory group, or committee or putting together a new project.

• A charter provides guidance, aligns the project or team goals, and helps make the business case for the effort. This charter is meant to be both a guide and template; it contains many common elements that can be customized. Consider what is important for your successful work together and include those key elements in your team’s charter.

Using Healthy People 2030 to Develop Multi-Sector Partnerships 

• This new toolkit developed by NACCHO, with support from the Office of Disease Prevention and Health Promotion in the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services, focuses on how multisector partnerships can use Healthy People 2030 objectives to address vital issues in communities. Working across and engaging stakeholders across the spectrum of expertise—including public health, healthcare, education, housing, economic development, and transit—multi-sector partnerships seek to pool resources, skills, and knowledge to work together more effectively to address critical problems.  The toolkit will:  
• Define multisector partnerships (MSPs), and consider the rationale for and evidence base to support their use
• Guide MSPs on using Healthy People 2030 objectives and LHIs to help identify local needs and priority populations
• Underscore priority areas of Healthy People 2030 that guide selection of potential partners from non-health sectors

• Offer direction on using federal Healthy People 2030 objective data as a benchmark for tracking local measure

A Happy and Healthy Winter

• From festive gatherings to healthcare appointments, make this winter your happiest and healthiest yet. In this toolkit, you’ll find a curated collection of tips from the Public Health Communications Collaborative to protect your mental and physical health this season.

Community-Led Suicide Prevention Specific Resources

• These resources were developed specifically for Community-Led Suicide Prevention (CLSP) and connected projects. They range from tools to navigate this site to ones to help grow your prevention efforts. Use these resources to help bring your CLSP work to life.

Mental Health Month Toolkits

• Mental Health America has put together a yearly toolkit for Mental Health Month that includes sample social media posts, outreach ideas, key messages, and more.

National Center for Farmworker Health: Mental Health Resource Hub

• The National Center for Farmworker Health, Inc. has developed this Mental Health Resource Hub to address the need for information on behavioral health integrated services and mental health with Migratory and Seasonal Agricultural Workers (MSAWs). We also seek to provide this population greater access to culturally appropriate mental health services across the country.
• The Mental Health Resource Hub provides patient education materials, mental health screening tools, and national resources that support mental health outreach and advance integrated behavioral health interventions utilized with the MSAW population. It also features screening tools gathered from guest speakers and health resources and patient education materials developed by NCFH with input from the​ Mental Health Learning Collaborative (MHLC), a collaboration supported by HRSA to the build the capacity of health center staff within Migrant and Community Health centers in successfully integrating behavioral health services with primary care for their MSAW patients.

National Suicide Prevention Month Resources

• We can all help prevent suicide. Every year, the Lifeline and other mental health organizations and individuals across the U.S. and around the world raise awareness of suicide prevention during September, National Suicide Prevention Month.

One Health Clinic Toolkit

• The toolkit guides setting up a One Health Clinic in your community to serve the human-animal unit. Since this concept for clinical care is novel, it provides concrete guidance about how to set up and operate a One Health clinic.
• The toolkit is based on the experience of the University of Washington Center for One Health Research and the Washington State University College of Veterinary Medicine—in collaboration with Neighborcare Health—who have been running a One Health clinic for several years. We created the toolkit as a result of fielding numerous requests from groups in the US and overseas who are interested in setting up similar clinical services.

Community Action Plan Templates for Children's Environmental Health

• ASTHO, through support from EPA, developed a set of four Community Action Plan Templates for use by state and territorial health agencies. These templates are intended to be adapted and customized by jurisdictions according to their specific needs and goals for children’s environmental health. Jurisdictions can prioritize the most pressing actions based on the areas of highest importance, needs, strategic plans, and timelines. The templates focus on air quality, climate, environmental justice, and lead poisoning. They provide a roadmap for creating community change by specifying what will be done, who will do it, and how it will be done. Health agencies can utilize the templates when helping communities develop new (or refine existing) action plans. Learn more about the templates by exploring the primer, or dive right in with one of the four templates below.

Summary of Local Health Department Planning Documents: Best Practices and Trends

• In September 2023, the National Association of City and County Health Officials (NACCHO)
  released a Request for Proposals for an “Environmental Scan and Summary of Local Health
  Department Planning Documents.” The overall purpose of this initiative was to provide local
  health departments (LHD) with information about trends seen across LHD plans. The project
  focused on the three key plans that LHDs use to guide their organizational strategies and
  activities: strategic plans (SP), community health improvement plans (CHIP), and quality
  improvement plans (QIP). Sinai Urban Health Institute (SUHI) was selected to conduct the
  environmental scan and document analysis. Specifically, the analysis sought to answer the
  following research questions:
  1. What goals, priorities, and strategies are included in LHD strategic plans (SP),
     community health improvement plans (CHIP), and quality improvement (QIP) plans
     across the country?
  2. How are SPs, CHIPs, and QIPs similar and different across LHDs?

Adverse Childhood Experiences Prevention Policy Toolkit

• Adverse childhood experiences (ACEs) include abuse (emotional, physical, and sexual), household challenges (violence in the home, substance use, mental illness, parental separation or divorce, and incarcerated household member), and neglect (emotional and physical) experienced before age 18.

Community Violence Prevention Resource for Action: A Compilation of the Best Available Evidence for Youth and Young Adults

• Community violence happens in public places, such as streets or parks, between people who may or may not know each other. Examples include assaults, fights among groups, homicides, and fatal and nonfatal shootings.
• This resource is informed by research and conversations with community members, people who have experienced violence, and other partners. It is an update to the Youth Violence Prevention Resource for Action. It includes evidence for preventing violence experienced by youth (ages 10-24), which is now under the larger community violence topic. In this update, we expand the evidence to include examples for preventing violence experienced by young adults (ages 25-34). Young adults ages 20-24 have the highest homicide rate. They are closely followed by young adults between the ages of 25-29, 30-34, and then teens ages 15-19.

Evidence-based Strategies and Resources to Increase Vaccination Rates and Confidence: A Toolkit for Healthcare Providers

• The Public Health Foundation (PHF), in collaboration with the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), developed this toolkit for healthcare providers as part of a series of toolkits being developed for CDC's broader Let's RISE (Routi​ne Immunizations on Schedule for Everyone​) playbook.

• Healthcare providers are essential in promoting public health, including routine vaccinations to protect children, families, and communities from vaccine-preventable diseases. CDC noted a concerning drop in routine vaccinations for children during the COVID-19 pandemic, leaving at least ¼ million children who entered kindergarten at that time at increased risk for serious illness. As trusted community leaders, healthcare providers have unique opportunities to communicate with and support families in ensuring children are up to date on all Advisory Committee on Immunization Practices (ACIP) recommended childhood vaccines, including the flu, COVID-19, and HPV vaccines.

• This toolkit is geared towards healthcare providers such as pediatricians, family medicine physicians, nurses​​, pharmacists, and others. It contains evidence-based strategies, tools, and resources compiled from medical professional organizations, state health departments, public health organizations, and government agencies to help get routine immunization coverage back to pre-pandemic levels. ​

Healthy Heart, Healthy Brain

• ASTHO, with support from the CDC Alzheimer’s Disease and Healthy Aging Program, partnered with the International Association for Indigenous Aging (IA²) to produce a series of health communication materials to improve quality, availability, and accessibility of public health resources to address the connection between brain health and heart health. All materials are informed by the Healthy Brain Initiative State and Local Public Health Partnerships to Address Dementia, The 2018-2023 Road Map, and the Road Map for Indian County.

Integrating Brain Health into Health Improvement Planning

• Over the last decade, more awareness of funding for programming, and treatment options have become available to individuals and populations to advance brain health across the life course. This changing landscape provides an opportunity for public health professionals to gain knowledge, build skills, and utilize tools to implement public health approaches focused on advancing brain health. There are opportunities for public health intervention to impact brain health of the population through prevention strategies, including risk reduction, early detection and diagnosis, and safety and quality of care.
• The Integrating Brain Health into Health Improvement Planning guide will create a bridge between established resources on healthy aging, brain health, and community public health planning and improvement. Specifically, this guide offers a shared public health approach to advancing brain health through the National Association of County and City Health Officials (NACCHO) Mobilizing for Action through Planning and Partnerships (MAPP) framework and the Alzheimer’s Association and Centers for Disease Control and Prevention Healthy Brain Initiative Road Map.
• This guide will build public health knowledge and skills, as well as serve as a roadmap to support advancing brain health across communities where people live, work, play, and learn. The time is now to act and support brain health.

Integrating Sustainability into Healthy Brain Initiative Implementation

• Comprehensive sustainability plans are essential for public health programs to ensure long-term benefits and maintain community trust. For the Healthy Brain Initiative (HBI) specifically, implementing sustainability strategies empowers populations to lead lives with the healthiest brains possible.
• This resource hub guides health agencies who are working to implement the HBI State and Local Road Map for Public Health, 2023-2027. The videos and written resource detail collaborative approaches for integrating sustainability and operationalizing equity throughout this important work, and highlight state success stories that agencies can draw inspiration from for their own efforts.

National Prevention Week Toolkit

• The National Prevention Week planning and promotional materials were created to help your ongoing prevention efforts. You can help raise awareness about the importance of positive mental health and substance misuse prevention by hosting prevention events and sharing promotional materials to connect your local event with the National Prevention Week movement.

Ways Schools Can Support Routine Vaccination: Catch-up Among School-Aged Children: A Toolkit for Educational Professionals

• This actionable toolkit is geared towards education professionals such as superintendents, school administrators, school nurses, and all school health staff. It contains evidence-based strategies, tools, and resources from professional education organizations and school health partners, state and local health departments, public health partners, and government organizations.

Act for Public Health: Network for Public Health Law

• The backlash in response to public health measures taken during the pandemic has resulted in many states passing laws restricting the ability of public health to take action to protect the health of their communities. However, there are many states that have taken innovative actions that strengthen public health authority and provide mechanisms that support a strong public health infrastructure.
• This new report from the Network for Public Health Law, produced as part of Act for Public Health, examines laws and policies being enacted across the U.S. in several key areas that serve as a model for best practices moving forward, including:
  • Governance
  • Funding
  • Health equity
  • Infrastructure
  • Workforce
  • Public health interventions

Building Non-Traditional Public Health Multisector Partnerships: How State and Territorial Health Agencies Can Leverage Healthy People 2030 for Innovative Collaboration to Improve Health Outcomes and Advance Health Equity

• The goal of this toolkit is to help state and territorial health agencies (S/THAs) build non-traditional, non-public health sector partnerships to improve health outcomes and advance health equity. The Healthy People 2030 objectives, aligned closely with the Social Determinants of Health (SDOH) framework and Health in All Policies (HiAP) lens, can serve as the cornerstone of these collaborations. This toolkit is implementation-focused, providing partnership-building and -sustaining skills that are rooted in Healthy People 2030 tools and success stories and can be operationalized for community needs.

Rural Community Health Toolkit

• Welcome to the Rural Community Health Toolkit. This toolkit provides rural communities with the information, resources, and materials they need to develop a community health program in a rural community.

• Each of the toolkit's six modules contains information that communities can apply to develop a rural health program, regardless of the specific health topic the program addresses. The toolkit also links to issue-specific toolkits for more in-depth information.

SOPHE's Toolkit to Support Remote Delivery of Arthritis-Appropriate Evidence-based Interventions (AAEBI)

•  This toolkit provides resources for health educators, health providers, community organization representatives, and other stakeholders wishing to gain knowledge and actionable steps to deliver remote formats of AAEBIs.

  The pages within the toolkit contain program descriptions, a comparison table of programs, and external resources that can help health educators and other professionals at any stage of AAEBI activity, from program discovery to long-term maintenance.

Service and Resource Sharing Agreements: Guidance for State Health Departments

• State Guidance for Service and Resource Sharing Approaches (SRSAs)" by PHAB provides guidance for state health departments to enhance public health services through collaboration. It highlights state roles in designing SRSAs, supporting local health departments, and fostering partnerships to improve outcomes. Approaches include local, regional/district, and state-level strategies. Success depends on clear objectives, balanced priorities, and trust. PHAB's Center for Innovation offers tools and resources tailored to specific needs, aiding implementation. These strategies promote efficient, equitable public health services statewide.

Centro de Recursos de Salud Mental en Español

• The New Mental Health Resources Hub in Spanish provides a comprehensive collection of mental health materials to assist individuals, families, and others in accessing valuable mental health resources for the Spanish-speaking community.

National Emerging Special Pathogens Training and Education Center (NETEC) I Biocontainment Unit Training Strategies Toolkit

• The  Biocontainment Unit (BCU) Training Strategies Toolkit, developed by NETEC’s BCU Leadership Workgroup with members from the nation’s Regional Emerging Special Pathogens Treatment Centers (RESPTCs) , is a resource for health care facilities at every level of special pathogens care. This toolkit includes strategies for staff recruitment, training, retention, and sustainment of staff who may be working in special pathogen isolation areas. All facilities, regardless of the type, should incorporate preparedness strategies into everyday patient care. Each chapter outlines the differentiated level of care required within each tier of the regional approach. The document is meant to serve programs as a guide and a tool. 

Addressing Employee Mental Health and Distress

• The National Safety Council has compiled a list of resources for addressing employee mental health.

Begin Addressing Opioids in Your Organization

• The free Opioids At Work Employer Toolkit will help you:

• • Understand opioids and how they impact the workplace
  • Learn about opioid misuse and opioid use disorder
  • Recognize signs of impairment
  • Educate employees on the risks of opioid use
  • Incorporate the right elements into drug-related HR policies and procedures
  • Support employees who are struggling with opioid misuse or opioid use disorder

• This free toolkit includes sample policies, fact sheets, presentations, 5-minute safety talks, posters, white papers, reports, videos. and more so you can implement a workplace program on opioids. 

Healthy Work Tools

• We created Healthy Work Tools to give you resources for and recommendations about organizational change from experts in the field of work stress. They’re designed to help you take action to address work stressors that could make you, your colleagues or your employees ill, less productive or undercut your organization’s bottom line.

Healthy Work Tools: For Employers

• In this resource, you will find tools and strategies from experts in the field of work stress to help you take action to address the work stressors that threaten the health and well-being of employees and make your organization less productive.

Occupational Safety and Health Administration: Workplace Stress

• It is imperative to talk about mental health; shine light on the stressors; strategize about ways to alleviate stress them; and be on the lookout for signs and symptoms of stress and mental health emergencies so that people can either direct themselves, their friends, co-workers or family members to helpful coping and resiliency resources or other supportive networks and services if needed. The key is to build awareness, and the outreach products identified below will help with that goal. Workers and employers alike will benefit from the information, and the latter may wish to use these resources as building blocks for creating an awareness campaign within their organization. Employers, unions, and worker organizations can and should take all steps to protect the mental health of workers. Unions and worker organizations can also serve an important role in supporting workplace mental health and well-being through their member services as well as their outreach and community engagement work.

The Ultimate Workplace Mental Health Toolkit

• Most employers know why their employees’ physical health matters. Employees and employers alike often see it as the employer’s duty to care for their employees’ health. Many employers simply see taking care of their employees’ physical health as the right thing to do. But they also know that they will see a return on their investment in employee physical health. Healthy employees are more productive and less likely to miss work. Moreover, taking care of employees’ physical health improves team member retention and prevents costly compliance issues.
• Slowly but surely, employers are starting to recognize that mental health, and healthcare, is just as essential as physical health. Mental health is going mainstream and modern human resources teams need to be up-to-date on workplace mental health and how they should be approaching it.
• In this guide, we will explore the key concepts of workplace mental health and how to optimize your workplace to foster positive mental health. So whether you are well-versed in the language and concepts of mental health or are trying to fill what you see as a knowledge gap, this toolkit will provide you with clear explanations and actionable steps to improve your workplace mental health approach.

The Working Well Toolkit

• Directly from expertise shared by leading employers, the Working Well Toolkit provides human resource professionals and business leaders with practical information and strategies, assessment tools, mental health programs, and case studies to educate employers about current best practices to create supportive workplace environments.

University of Buffalo Well-being Checklists and Measures

• The following assessments are intended to help you examine your current well-being and some factors that may contribute to how you experience stressful circumstances. Read over the assessment descriptions to find the topics that may pertain to you.

Workplace Mental Health: ICU Program

• The ICU Program is an awareness campaign made especially for the workplace, designed to reduce the stigma associated with mental health and foster a workplace culture that supports emotional health. Developed by DuPont’s Employee Assistance Program, the ICU Program was delivered to each of their 70,000 employees worldwide. DuPont has since donated ICU to the Center for Workplace Mental Health, who now makes it available to employers across all sectors, industries, and sizes, cost-free.

• The ICU Program points out that just as people with a physical injury or illness may require help through an Intensive Care Unit, people with a psychological/emotional injury or illness may also require help from one another. Thus, “ICU” becomes “I See You.”

Workplace mental health resources for employees

• We know that regardless of profession, work affects a person’s mental health in one way or another. Whether you’re struggling with a specific situation at work, or you’re searching for options to manage work with a mental health condition, you’ve come to the right place.

Workplace mental health resources for employers

• In the last several years, employers have seen a notable emphasis on mental health and wellness in the workplace. We’ve gathered information and resources to answer frequently asked questions and offer practical ways you can make mental health a priority throughout your organization.