In Baltimore, inequities in health and social systems are well documented. Less attention has been paid to how institutions build or lose trust through everyday interactions, and the role communication plays in shaping those experiences.
At the 2026 International Social and Behavior Change Communication Summit in Panama City, Panama, a panel titled “Connection as the Practice of Equity: Lessons from Baltimore City on SBC, Healing, and Shared Power” will explore how this plays out in practice.
The session brings together four Johns Hopkins Center for Communication Programs-led, Baltimore-based efforts that ask a similar question: how do routine interactions between communities and institutions shape trust over time?
It explores this question through real-life examples, including efforts to share power in program design, youth storytelling that builds trust across generations, co-designed hackathons that support harm reduction, and coalition work focused on sustaining impact over time.
While the initiatives focus on different areas, including youth engagement, harm reduction, work with men and boys, and partnership models, they share a common approach.
Communication is not treated primarily as messaging, but as something that structures participation, decision-making, and the quality of relationships between people and institutions.
As August Summers, who leads CCP’s domestic initiatives, explains: “It’s about showing up consistently with openness and welcoming different ways for people to share their experiences and ideas. Our work is strongest when community members actively shape the messages and tools created for their own communities.”
The CCP work highlighted at the Summit includes several initiatives where partners and funders align with this trust-building, community-partnered approach, including UChoose, B’more for Healthy Babies, the Go Slow campaign, Black and Latino Outreach Project to Reduce Overdose Disparities project, and Wellbeing among Men and Boys project.
A central feature of the work is attention to trauma and how it shapes those interactions. In many Baltimore communities, experiences of violence, exclusion, and institutional neglect influence how people engage with programs and services today.
The initiatives in this panel respond by focusing on what those histories look like in practice. This includes whether people feel heard, whether interactions feel respectful, and whether institutions follow through on what they say they will do.
Rather than saying trust is absent, CCP’s work starts from the reality that trust already exists in many relationships but is unevenly supported and not always reinforced by systems designed to serve communities.
Across these efforts, the focus is not just on what programs deliver, but how they are designed and carried out. This includes co-creating narratives with young people, developing harm reduction efforts with people who use drugs, and emphasizing relationships, continuity, and follow-through in how institutions engage with communities.
Taken together, these efforts raise practical questions for social and behavior change practice.
“Effective campaigns don’t just speak to communities. They are shaped by them,” says CCP’s Tina Suliman, whose work focuses on equity-centered communication strategy, “When lived experience and local voices lead the conversation, solutions become more humane, more trusted, and far more impactful.”
For practitioners, this shifts attention toward the conditions under which communication happens, not just the content being delivered. It suggests that effective SBC work depends as much on how institutions behave in relation to communities as on the messages they design.
“The Baltimore experience shows how trust is built in practice and how communication is part of that process rather than separate from it,” says CCP’s Apral Smith-Jefferson, who works on Baltimore-based projects.
The Baltimore panel is among more than a dozen presentations being offered by CCP at the 2026 SBCC Summit, which runs from June 22 to 26. There is still time to register. For more information, click here.
