The voices and lived experiences of communities most impacted by health policy have often been left out of the decisions that shape their care. Meanwhile, researchers and advocates are generating powerful, community-rooted evidence that doesn’t always reach the policy and legal arenas where it could have the greatest impact. Bridging this gap between community knowledge and policy action is both an urgent challenge and a critical opportunity.
At AcademyHealth, we are working to close that gap by supporting researchers in translating community-led evidence into policy-relevant strategies, narratives, and tools. Through initiatives like the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation (RWJF)’s Interdisciplinary Research Leaders (IRL) program, we partnered with teams of academic researchers and community leaders to ensure that evidence grounded in lived experience can meaningfully shape policy and public discourse.
Across seven cohorts and nearly 300 Fellows since 2016, IRL teams have tackled a remarkable range of community health challenges—from green schoolyard conversion in Tacoma, to telehealth access for probation-supervised individuals living in rural Arkansas, to food sovereignty in North Philadelphia, to Medicaid justice in Indiana. What unites this work is a shared commitment to centering community voice and translating evidence into action where it matters most.
One powerful example of this approach in action is the Fight On: Medicaid Panoply project led by Cohort 7’s Team Indiana. This work brought together qualitative and quantitative evidence with art, poetry, and film to advance a community-informed vision of Medicaid justice—one that reflects the realities, priorities, and expertise of the communities most affected by Medicaid policy decisions.
But generating evidence is only part of the equation. Ensuring that it reaches and resonates with those shaping policy and legal decisions requires intentionally making research actionable for those audiences.
Through AcademyHealth’s annual Policy and Communications Workshops, IRL Fellows received hands-on support to strengthen how they communicate their research. Training included strategic framing, message development, and in-person technical assistance to help tailor their work for policy and advocacy contexts. In these settings, Fellows identified key audiences, clarified the implications of their research, and developed materials that extend beyond academic formats. Rather than simply disseminating results, they focused on translation: shaping evidence into accessible formats and compelling narratives that decision-makers can understand and use. For many teams, this support helped shape how findings travel into policy and practice conversations.
For Team Indiana, this work resulted in a policy-focused advocacy resource designed to engage legal and policy audiences. Fellows connected community experiences to broader policy debates and positioned their work to inform real-world decisions. Ultimately, their work extended beyond traditional policy briefs and presentations, with evidence incorporated into a Friend of the Court (amicus curiae) brief submitted to the D.C. District Court in litigation related to Medicaid policy.
This moment represents something significant: community-rooted research informing one of the highest levels of legal decision-making in the United States. It demonstrates that when evidence is grounded in lived experience and intentionally translated for impact, it can shape not only conversations, but concrete and far-reaching outcomes.
Importantly, this kind of impact does not happen by accident. It requires infrastructure, support, and a broader commitment to rethinking how research is positioned in policy spaces.
It also requires humility about where the program’s contribution starts and stops. Not every IRL story looks like a Supreme Court brief. The Growing Freedom Down North project, led by Cohort 7’s Team North Philadelphia, worked to establish a healing garden along with horticulture and culinary programming for incarcerated youth in Philadelphia. The project has reached national audiences—NPR, NBC News, ABC’s Good Morning America, the Philadelphia Inquirer—largely because the team brought a distinctive vision, deep community roots, and a compelling story rooted in Muhammad Abdul-Hadi’s work with Down North Pizza, which exclusively employs formerly incarcerated people. The lesson here isn’t about what any training program produced. It’s about what becomes possible when community partners are positioned to lead, when their expertise and instincts are trusted, and when researchers collaborate effectively. IRL’s role in stories like this is less about teaching translation, and more about creating the conditions (e.g. funding, time, partnership structures, peer networks) that allow community-led work to flourish on its own terms.
Across the IRL portfolio, translation takes many forms. Cohort 1 teams whose research focused on Housing, Community Development and Health contributed to a special issue of Housing Policy Debate aimed directly at housing policy audiences. Eight Fellow and alumni teams co-authored a 2024 special issue of the Journal of Participatory Research Methods on dismantling structural racism through community-engaged research. Other Fellows have written op-eds and commentary—like Cohort 4’s Luisa Blanco of Team Los Angeles, who wrote on financial stress experienced by Latino communities during COVID-19. A legal brief is one expression of this practice; a peer-reviewed special issue or a national news story is another. What ties them together is the sustained investment in Fellows and community partners over time, and a commitment to sharing research in ways that are accessible and useful to decision-makers and the public.
At AcademyHealth, this work is part of a broader effort to strengthen the connection between evidence and action. Through efforts like our annual Health Policy Orientation (HPO), Stand with AHRQ Toolkit, Communicating for Impact course, and other initiatives, we are investing in the skills, relationships, and systems needed to ensure research can more effectively inform policy. This includes supporting researchers in understanding policy processes, engaging with decision-makers, and communicating across disciplines and sectors.
Together, these efforts reflect a shift beyond traditional dissemination models, where research is shared after the fact, toward a more integrated approach, where translation, engagement, and impact are embedded from the start.
As the field continues to grapple with how to advance health equity in meaningful ways, this example underscores an important lesson: evidence alone is not enough. To drive change, it must be translated, communicated, and strategically positioned in the spaces where decisions are made. Sometimes that means tailoring evidence for a specific decision-making audience, as Team Bloomington demonstrated. Other times, it means creating the conditions for community-led work to speak for itself, as Team North Philadelphia reminds us. Both are expressions of the same practice: centering community voice, sharing power, and recognizing that meaningful impact depends not only on generating evidence, but also on ensuring it reaches the people and places where it can make a difference.
When that happens, research does more than inform—it helps shape more just and equitable systems.