Powering Wellness with Words: Uttara Bharath Kumar

“I have a passion for trying to write or communicate around things that make a change.”

Uttara Bharath Kumar, Senior Program Officer II and Team Lead for India for the Center for Communications Programs (CCP) in the Bloomberg School of Public Health, has been on a mission to merge her love of writing and creativity with her desire to help make people healthier for more than three decades. While her undergraduate studies were in English, she also found herself a recipient of an Echoing Green Foundation Fellowship, fostering social innovation.

“It was just a small cohort of us back in the day, but they gave $15,000 to selected new graduates to start the passion project from their proposal, and my idea was to use community theater for social change. I liked writing and I thought writing scripts and thinking about social issues would be fun to do,” Bharath Kumar said.

This led her to relocate back to her home country, India, where she co-founded an NGO nonprofit in Chennai called Nalamdana, Are You Well? in Tamil, performing community theater and entertainment shows to provide persuasive health education to underrepresented communities. Here, she found these programs were not just powerful ways to translate important information, but also a way to create connections with the communities and unearth many of the health issues they face.

“I think entertainment education is one of the most powerful tools. Community theater, short films, music, poetry, anything that entertains people and makes them relax and be more receptive to information, “she explained. “You can model characters to show how behaviors can happen and the consequences on their lives, and that allows people to absorb it a little bit more.”

However, she cautions anyone making communications for educational purposes to keep some things in mind: Don’t be boring and give people quality work.

“Don’t give them something that’s mediocre. They have 100 different things they can watch or do with their time, “she said. “Even if you think it’s a low income or less educated audience, they deserve the best. Give them that and they’ll feel respected and will be more willing to listen and learn.”

“I’ve always been interested in health. But not interested in going into medicine.”

This experience is what led Bharath Kumar to Johns Hopkins University. “I needed to get more credentials in the health space and learn more about the public health content needs to determine what should get communicated,” she explained, driving her pursuit of a master’s degree in public health.

“Hopkins was my first choice, because the Center for Communication Programs (CCP) was a big attraction for me. CCP’s work spoke to a lot of the things I was interested in. Here was a whole center that focused on the same thing I was doing in India, but globally, and I didn’t see any of the other schools of public health with that kind of a large center focused on social and behavioral issues.”

While working on her MHS, she co-authored a paper with her graduate advisor, Dr. Tom Valente, who was also staff at CCP and an expert on social networks analysis. Their paper was on evaluating the effectiveness of Nalamdana’s community dramas for HIV prevention. That helped her practically apply what she had learned to what she knew from experience and check some of her assumptions and look at things from a critical lens. Now she teaches a class in the third quarter on Designing Health Communication Programs for Social and Behavior Change, which tries to apply some of those skills. Students in her class choose to work on a health communication project on an issue they deeply care about or are familiar with to bridge those learnings with the real world.

To complete her degree, Bharath Kumar’s practicum was an internship in Zambia through CCP, focused on the branding and launch of a national family planning campaign. This would turn into an eleven year-long journey working in the region before returning to India and Baltimore, where she continued to work with not just CCP, but also consultancies with the World Bank, WHO and USAID.

“You get funded, and you move on to the next project so, it’s a privilege if you’re able to see change in something that you had worked on a long time ago,” she said. “In Zambia, a lot of that was during the worst of the HIV years and I’d like to think a lot of what we did during that time contributed to reducing HIV infections and increasing uptake of antiretrovirals. So, at a crucial time in Zambia’s history, I feel I was able to be part of a team that played an important role.”

Communities Need Dialogue, Not Just Clinical Interventions

Bharath Kumar’s projects have ranged from ways to approach HIV, to gender-based violence, making sure pregnant women were aware of the danger signs in pregnancy, early childhood development, and developing child-friendly cities, among others. To more effectively communicate some of these health issues, she returned to her roots and worked with local illustrators, musicians and actors to use the power of music and storytelling to share information and shine a light on challenging social norms and spark conversations. With each of these audiences, she made sure to focus on a human-centered design process and then come up with testable and implementable solutions.

“In Karnataka, there was a small study with the WHO, but a very important one that tried to help community health workers understand how they could communicate to pregnant women and their families,” she explained. “They made the communication more audiovisual and standardized so that it didn’t rely on the skill set of one particular community health worker. The modules were on the mobile phones of health workers to make it easier”

She led CCP’s work, funded by the World Bank, to support the Government of Tamil Nadu to address the burden of noncommunicable diseases (NCDs) like diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and cancer, which she said is a leading cause for death in Tamil Nadu. Together with Dr. Radha Rajan and the Center for Communication and Change – India, they conducted research to understand the behavioral and social factors and to making recommendations to the Tamil Nadu government and supporting them in developing a strategic approach based on their research insights.

“This is the first Social and behavior Change Strategy in India for noncommunicable diseases to be developed, endorsed, and adopted by a state government. That’s big and important because then and it’ll be funded, making it more viable,” Bharath Kumar said. “Now it’s owned by the government and hopefully this will become entrenched in how they look at lifestyle influenced diseases, not just from the treatment end, but from a preventive and early treatment perspective as well.”

She notes that there are many factors in people’s environment that influence their behavior, and more thoughtful interventions that can address those norms and individual behaviors are going to be key to success in any communication project.

“Change comes through trust,” she explained. “You have to be as authentic as you can, because people will see through it if you’re there to just sort of check a box. When you deeply care about what you’re doing, it makes all the difference in the world.”

“An epiphany for me was that it’s not about individuals as much as it is about individuals in their social and physical context.”

While there are always funding limitations, Bharath Kumar has tried to keep her projects focused on areas she feels most connected with: gender, reproductive rights. She is currently working through CCP on the Women’s Integrated Sexual Heath (WISH) Project, focused on fragile and conflict settings in East and Southern Africa. Also pressing are issues of mental health. COVID-19, social media, increasingly sedentary lifestyles, and many, many hours of screentime are changing the landscape and cultural context for everyone, but especially for youth.

“I feel the social and behavioral intervention space around youth and mental health is critical going forward, and this ties into their reproductive health, their physical wellness. The mind and the body are so connected and when your mind is not happy, your body suffers,” she said. “Developing, creating, and enabling our youth with healthier habits and healthy practices is critical. That’s what the world needs now.”

Another passion is meeting mid-career professionals in a course she facilitates, Strategic Leadership and Strategic Communication at CCP. She’s taught it in 15 countries and loves when her students come back with their own epiphanies about social behavior change.

“The impact you can make on mid-career folks, when they’ve been doing something for a long time and it’s just not working, they’re not getting the results and suddenly there’s this light bulb that you’re able to facilitate to look at the issue from a behavioral or normative lens,” she said. “That’s brought me to the journey of wanting to teach, when you can help make those connections to practical examples that might move the needle for them in their work. That, to me, is what the joy of teaching is about.”