Jacqueline Schillereff is the executive director of the Birdsong Health Literacy Center of Excellence in Hampton Roads. Before this work, she helped build a regional fitness brand from its infancy.
When she was helping build OneLife Fitness, she told Zack Miller and Tim Ryan, people would come in and say, “we’ll join your gym when we get in shape.” It was, she said, “a misunderstood perception”: “people thought they had to be in shape to go to the gym.” The decision was, “we need to create our own brand.”
That same gap, between wanting to be well and knowing how, is the problem she is trying to close now.
Nine out of 10
Health literacy, as Jacqueline describes it, is not a niche issue. She put it this way: “nine out of 10 Americans don’t really get it,” “regardless of really any criteria, nine out of 10 because it’s just something people don’t understand.”
Separately, she added: “They really don’t know how to read a food label.”
The marketing around that food does not help. “Even the marketing, breakfast is the most important meal of the day and then you go down the cereal aisle and it’s just, it. It’s crazy.” The dollars behind those messages, she said, are “almost unlimited,” and it is “relentless marketing.”
Doctors, she added, “normally don’t have a lot of time.” Her practical advice was simple: “you’re going to go to the doctor, bring a list, have a checklist, they love that.”
If they leave, it’s on us
The OneLife chapter also gave her an operating rule. The team did exit interviews, but they tried not to need them.
“We tried to avoid getting to the point where people were leaving and we would say if they leave, it’s on us.” What was missing, she said, was “most likely communication.”
Even military members who had gyms on base sometimes chose OneLife instead. Jacqueline remembered meeting helicopter pilots and asking why they worked out there. She said “one of the reasons they stated was it was nice to get away from everybody else and be in a place that was a little more anonymous plus they liked the different amenities and the experience there.”
The number one problem is access
When the conversation turned to why good information still does not reach people, Jacqueline started with access.
She said “we feel that the number one problem is access. Most people just don’t have access to information. They don’t really know where to go.”
The Birdsong Center grew out of George Birdsong’s reaction to the health of the region. He “discovered how disappointing the health of our region was,” and, she said, “he was so stunned.” A partnership with Tom Chamberlain, whose Rewards for Healthy Living platform had already been used on the commercial side with employers, led them to offer a community version at no cost.
Free, it turns out, can be its own barrier. As she put it, “people are even paranoid about free. Why is it free?” She told a story from Busch Gardens, years ago, when she tried to give away a pair of tickets while people were standing in line for what she described as a “$200 ticket,” “a couple hundred bucks to get in there.” People looked at her and walked away. “I literally could not give these tickets away.”
Health is wealth
Jacqueline does not treat any of this as a new discovery. “2,500 years ago,” she said, “Hippocrates says, you know, health is the greatest of human blessings and this is nothing new.”
“Health is wealth if you’ve got to have health. If you don’t have health, you have no life,” she said.
That is also what she hears inside companies. When organizations come to Birdsong, she said, “the common denominator when we go to meet with people is people are experiencing a lot of anxiety.” “We’re pulled in a million different directions, we’ve got data coming at us constantly, we don’t have enough time to do what we need to do.”
The platform she described is kept current, with people “building code and security and the whole design team,” and “over a hundred topics,” plus videos and games. Certifications are built so people “can break it up”: “You can do an hour, 30 minutes, come back to it. It saves your work.” One of those certifications is on fentanyl, which she said “is the number one killer of adults 18 to 54 in America.” “I think we had six, seven hundred people now have completed that.” She also described a Healthier You certification, an awareness certification starting that month, a diabetes certification in November, and a new certification in December.
Sign-up, on purpose, asks for very little: a name and an email, she said. “People don’t want their information shared sometimes. So there’s an opportunity to be a guest and test it out.”
Why it matters
Jacqueline’s stories keep returning to the same obstacles. People say they will join a gym once they get in shape. They walk away from something free if they do not trust it. And if members leave, she said, “it’s on us.”
The work, as she tells it, starts with access: helping people know where to go, and giving them information they can actually use.
Hear the full conversation on Fervent Four:
About Jacqueline Schillereff: Jacqueline is executive director of the Birdsong Health Literacy Center of Excellence, a Hampton Roads nonprofit working to improve health literacy through education and community partnerships, including the Rewards for Healthy Living platform. Learn more at birdsonghlcoe.org. Connect with Jacqueline: LinkedIn.
