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Mobile Health Unit School Toolkit
Mobile health units (MHUs) provide medical, sexual, mental, and acute health services to high school students in under-resourced communities in Chicago. Our team partnered with MHUs in Chicago to create a school awareness campaign to increase awareness among adolescents about the quality care offered on the MHU. Our team co-designed the branding of the communication materials with adolescents through workshops and feedback sessions.
Since each school implements communication materials independently, the campaign materials are packaged as an easy-to-implement kit, and come with an instruction manual containing simple suggestions for roll out during the academic year.
The communication materials consist of a system of communication channels:
A texting program called, Schedule Finder Cards—cards contain a text code for students to message and find out when the MHU is visiting their school.
Posters and flyers share information regarding the MHU schedule, services offered, and raises awareness about young people’s rights to request services. Posters are hung in prominent yet discreet places and flyers are passed out during a pilot partnership with the Illinois Caucus for Adolescent Health—an in-school sexual health education workshop series.
An educational video about a typical experience on the unit. We also developed a pre-written letter from the principal to send to parents and staff.
Co-designing the MHU Educational video with adolescents
Through a series of co-design sessions with adolescents, our team developed an educational MHU video that can be shown at school assemblies, on morning announcements, or hyperlinked in an email. Adolescents shared their key messages for the video, wrote scripts, created storyboards, and wrote language for intro and conclusions text message sequences. With no professional production crew but a ton of spirit, our team set out to create a video for adolescents by adolescents to express what a typical MHU visit is like for a student.
The campaigns are currently being piloted in eight schools that the MHUs visit.
Role: Creative Lead + Design Researcher
Team: Ireashia Bennett, Quinn Burrell, Amanda Geppert, Laura Paradis, Catherine Wieczorek
Client: Center for Interdisciplinary Inquiry and Innovation at the University of Chicago