Empowering Student Barbers: Developing Culturally Relevant Health Literacy Interventions to Enhance Community Health Outcomes via Backward Design

Barbershops serve as vital community hubs in distressed areas, where individuals gather not only for grooming but also for social interaction, cultural exchange, and the dissemination of vital information. By recognizing the historical role of barbershops as community dialogue hubs, the project seeks to harness this potential to address health literacy gaps in distressed communities. It does so through a backward design intervention, which in part involves evaluating open dialogues between barbers, health literacy specialists, and community nurse stakeholders. Insights from these dialogues then guide student barbers in crafting health literacy strategies tailored to community needs using a backward design intervention. A backward design intervention is central to informing and enhancing the existing barber training curriculum, ensuring sustainable health literacy practices. Collaboration with the barbershop community, local health organizations, and educational institutions ensures the intervention is culturally relevant and effective. Ultimately, the project aims to develop a pipeline of barber students committed to improving community health outcomes, contributing significantly to the literature on health literacy and innovative community engagement Interventions.