Rural Project Examples Addressing Health literacy

Added February 2026

Need: To increase behaviors that will promote healthy aging in rural Oklahoma.
Intervention: Active Aging for L.I.F.E. offers a college class, lunch and learns, and a high school program that teaches students how their behaviors affect aging.
Results: High school students demonstrated more positive beliefs about growing older, better awareness of the role of physical and brain health, and an increased appreciation for older adults.

Updated/reviewed November 2025

Need: To encourage farmers to make health and safety changes on their farms.
Intervention: Farm Dinner Theater is an event in which farmers and their families watch three 10-minute plays covering health and safety topics and then discuss solutions to the issues addressed in each.
Results: In a study, farmers who attended the plays were more likely to make changes and tell others what they learned, compared to farmers who received an educational packet with the same information.

Updated/reviewed April 2026

Need: Increase health profession students' awareness of how plain language and health literacy principles can improve their written and spoken health messaging.
Intervention: Using a writing project that leverages plain language in health messaging, health profession learners participating in rural clinical rotations write health information articles for publication in rural community newspapers.
Results: Since the North Dakota program's start in 2017, nearly 100 students have successfully published articles in about 25 rural newspapers in 3 states. In recent years, increased program visibility has led to reprint and additional articles requests from a variety of state news publications, advocacy organizations, professional societies, and recent model replication in New York.

Added March 2026

Need: To help Federally Qualified Health Centers (FQHCs) and home visiting programs reduce smoking rates in rural Yuba County, California.
Intervention: A five-year initiative helped FQHCs with integrating tobacco user identification and cessation referral protocols and helped home visiting programs with tobacco screening and family wellness education.
Results: FQHCs and family-serving agencies achieved systems-level change through comprehensive tobacco-free policies, human resources procedures, and client screening protocols.

Updated/reviewed January 2026

Need: To promote mental health and prevent substance use disorders in rural Oregon, Washington, Idaho, and Alaska.
Intervention: Coast to Forest strengthened local capacity through training, technical assistance, education, and community partnerships.
Results: Since the project's launch in 2020, it trained over 800 individuals across the Pacific Northwest in Mental Health First Aid, developed 100 county-level resource guides, organized a series of Community Conversations in five rural Oregon counties, and more.

Updated/reviewed June 2024

Need: To increase access to health information in low-income and rural communities throughout the Midwest.
Intervention: The University of Missouri School of Information Science & Learning Technologies developed Catalysts for Community Health (C4CH), an interdisciplinary program designed to train Master of Library and Information Science students to expand health information resources for underserved communities.
Results: The cohort of 10 students graduated in summer of 2022.

Rural Project Examples: Health literacy