Access Fund Spotlight: Northeast Ohio PIO Workgroup

The Northeast Ohio PIO Workgroup is a newly forming regional collaborative that brings together public health communicators from counties across Northeast Ohio. They meet monthly to coordinate messaging, share resources, and build cross-county communications infrastructure. Each county maintains its own branding and makes its own decisions about what to share — but the group develops content together, pools assets (like these Lyme Disease posts), and learns from each other's results. Early Arclet posts are already outperforming what members have seen from their social content historically.

To help them think through what a maturing collaborative looks like in practice, Adrienne connected them with Clarissa Ashe, Deputy Health Director at Jackson County Health Department and a longtime member of the WNC Health Communicators Collaborative — the 18-county western North Carolina collaborative that inspired Arclet's founding.

Clarissa joined their May meeting as a special guest, sharing hard-won lessons on cross-county messaging, navigating different political climates, and getting executive leadership to buy in. On the question of how counties can work together without losing local control, she put it simply:

"Just because you're part of a collaborative doesn't mean you don't still have the ability to customize for your region or your county — but the footwork is already there."

That ethos shapes how Arclet is built. The platform supports collaborative messaging while keeping decision-making power at the local level — counties work from shared, public-health-vetted content, but every choice about what to publish, how to brand it, and what message fits their community stays with them. Regional coordination and local autonomy don't have to be in tension. That's what we're trying to make easier.

We're glad the Northeast Ohio PIO Workgroup raised their hand. That's exactly what the Access Fund is for.