Arizona State University's Walter Cronkite School of Journalism and Mass Communication has received a three-year, $800,000 grant from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation to launch a new initiative called the Health Communication Accelerator. The program is designed to improve health outcomes by closing communication gaps between health professionals and the communities they serve, using a combination of research, student training and real-world testing.
How the program is structured
The accelerator will focus on a different health challenge each year, bringing together students, faculty researchers, communication practitioners and community partners around a shared problem. The school's in-house Cronkite Agency, which has previously won awards for its work, will anchor the effort by conducting audience research, running pilot messaging tests and producing practical communication tools that community organizations can put to use. The stated goal is to build an evidence base for what communication approaches actually work, rather than relying on assumptions about how health information should be delivered.
According to the school, the initiative is meant to merge four elements that often operate separately: academic research, professional communication practice, partnerships with community organizations and training for the next generation of communicators. Jessica Pucci, senior associate dean of the Cronkite School, said the project reflects a belief that "access to good health information is as essential to our communities' well-being as access to health care itself." Dean Battinto L. Batts Jr. said the school considers itself positioned to provide "expertise, insights and training" to address the problem.
Context: a longer relationship with the foundation
This grant builds on a relationship between the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and the Cronkite School that dates to 2018. In 2022, the foundation awarded the school a separate $1.3 million grant for the Southwest Health Reporting and Communications Initiative, which focused on health disparities affecting Hispanic and Indigenous communities. That earlier project included a dedicated reporting team within Cronkite News and a Spanish-language health campaigns team inside the Cronkite Agency. The new accelerator appears to extend that model into a broader, multi-year format rather than concentrating on a single population or region.
The initiative is also described as running alongside ASU Health, a wider university effort aimed at changing how health care is designed and delivered, and it falls under ASU's larger Changing Futures campaign, which includes goals related to community resilience and health system development.
What the grant can and cannot guarantee
Based on the information available, the accelerator is a communication and research program, not a clinical or treatment initiative. Its intended contributions are tools, messaging strategies and workforce training-not direct health services. Emerging health care professionals are expected to use materials developed through the program to help navigate misinformation and cultural differences in how health information is shared, according to the school's own description of the project.
It remains to be seen which specific health topic the accelerator will address first, what measurable outcomes it will produce, or how its tools will be adopted beyond ASU's immediate partners. The school has framed the program as a potential "national model," but that characterization reflects its own stated ambition rather than an independently verified result at this stage.