Building Awareness and Action Ideas

We want to help you promote health literacy by building awareness and creating action events or activities. Below we included some ideas to help you in your planning.

We also encourage you to share your ideas on how you, your team, or your organization is participating in Health Literacy Month. We will keep this activity list so others can learn from your experiences.

Health Literacy Proclamations 

Many states have adopted formal proclamations to raise awareness about the importance of health literacy and support efforts to improve low health literacy. Here are some examples:


The State Health Literacy Proclamation Toolkit

Provides guidance to states to develop and submit a health literacy proclamation to the Governor's Office for the month of October, and promotion of the proclamation signing. Get started today!

Action Ideas from Past Discussion List Contributors

Contributor Organization Action Idea
Katherine Leath & Tonilee Jackson-Price, MS, CHES UAMS Center for Health Literacy #Plainpledge™ is the name for their month-long social media awareness campaign. They asked people to post selfies holding cards that have a difficult to understand health word that they pledged not to use.
Anna Allen Say Ah! Dedicated Health Literacy Month to supporting Janet Ohene-Frempong (and others!) work to Get Out the Vote (#GOTV). Posted on social media platforms about important state voter registration deadlines.
Carolyn Cutilli PhD RN NPD-BC Hospital of the University of Pennsylvania Focusing on telemedicine, they presented a virtual presentation.
Iris Feinberg The Georgia Alliance for Health Literacy and the Adult Literacy Research Center at Georgia State University (GSU) Sponsored a lunch time event with the Law and Health Society at GSU, presenting "From Coverage to Care: Advancing Equity through Health Literacy".
Geri Lynn Baumblett Emmi Solutions Created a blog series where people from different communities contribute, interact, and get exposure to each other – including patients, clinicians, decision scientists, behavioral economists, journalists, and family caregivers.
Hope Schwanhausser, MPH, EdS Carolinas HeatlhCare System Created an online health literacy quiz for employees.
Krista Wright and Angie Knackstedt Children’s Mercy Hospital & Clinics Created health literacy hero t-shirts for committee members. Hosted a Champions luncheon for the hospital president, vice-presidents and department managers. Displayed information on health literacy and teach-back to staff, families and visitors using stickers and handouts in English and Spanish. Gave a hospital-wide Hero award to an employee who utilized health literacy principles to provide exceptional communication.

Share Your Action Ideas

Please share how you, your team, or your organization is helping to build awareness about Health Literacy Month so others can learn from your experiences.


Click Here to Share Your Action Idea

New Blog by Helen Osborne, M.Ed., OTR/L

Helen discusses Health Literacy Month and ways to participate, including examples - read it today!


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Building Awareness to New Heights!


On October 2nd 2022, Toronto's CN Tower was lit for Health Literacy Month. The colors of orange and blue lit up the night sky in downtown Toronto, Ontario, Canada. Help us share this exciting event to build awareness of Health Literacy Month!