Connection is the mechanism through which my work becomes actionable. I curate connection by bringing together groups that are rarely positioned as collaborators, including youth, clinicians, researchers, educators, artists, and policymakers. Rather than translating information to communities, I prioritize translating it with them, ensuring that multiple forms of expertise shape both content and delivery.

In practice, this means facilitating co-design processes where lived experience shapes health communication from the outset. In youth mental health initiatives, I gather narratives from rural and urban youth and work with professionals to turn those experiences into evidence-based recommendations, toolkits, and interim supports that meet people where they are. In my creative work, I collaborate closely with physicians, educators, caregivers, and young advocates to ensure that children’s books are medically accurate, culturally relevant, and emotionally resonant.

Connection is also built through presence. By visiting schools and community spaces to lead workshops with children, I create opportunities to model the strategies embedded in the resources I help develop. These sessions allow children to practice skills in real time and provide direct feedback on what feels accessible, confusing, or empowering. This feedback loop strengthens trust and ensures that health communication reflects how information is actually understood and used.

Listening has repeatedly reshaped my approach. Hearing advocates reflect on how limited health literacy in childhood led to disengagement from health systems later in life reinforced the importance of early, relational knowledge sharing. These moments taught me that connection is not symbolic, instead, it is embedded in processes of perspective-sharing that allow people to see themselves reflected in health knowledge. When that happens, engagement becomes sustained, trust deepens, and health communication begins to influence population-level wellbeing.

Connection will remain foundational to my future work in health research, communication, and policy. Development and population health efforts often fail when they treat knowledge as static or universally applicable. Connection allows evidence to move across contexts while remaining grounded in local realities, lived experience, and cultural meaning.

I see connection as the bridge between research, practice, and community knowledge. Building durable, multidisciplinary networks between communities, institutions, educators, artists, clinicians, and decision-makers ensures that health interventions are not only effective but equitable. The connections that matter most are longitudinal, where communities are involved from problem definition through design, implementation, and evaluation, rather than consulted at a single point in time.

In my future work, I aim to continue using creative and participatory approaches to ensure health knowledge is not only shared but understood, practiced, and adapted. This includes expanding community-based workshops, strengthening partnerships with schools and shelters, and embedding co-creation into research and policy processes. Creativity will remain central, as it allows health information to resonate emotionally and practically across entire populations.

Sustainable and inclusive development depends on trust, shared language, reciprocity, and imagination. When health knowledge is decentralized and translated through relationships in ways that reflect how people live, learn, and care for one another, it becomes adaptive rather than prescriptive. In that sense, connection is not an accessory to impact, it is what allows impact to endure.