Adrienne Ammerman, founder of Arclet
When the COVID-19 pandemic exposed just how fragile the nation’s public health communication systems were, many people focused on misinformation as the problem. For Adrienne Ammerman, the issue ran deeper. What she saw—long before the pandemic—was a field full of committed professionals who simply lacked the tools, time, and infrastructure to do their jobs well.
That insight is what led Ammerman, a longtime public health communications leader, to create Arclet: a collaborative, technology-enabled platform designed to support local health communicators with evidence-based messaging, shared insights, and practical tools that meet them where they are.
Ammerman’s career has always lived at the intersection of systems and people. She has spent years helping organizations translate complex health information into language communities can understand and use—whether at national advocacy organizations like the National Women’s Law Center, community-based groups such as Bread for the City in Washington, D.C., or regional public health collaboratives in North Carolina. But it was her work beginning in 2019 at the WNC Health Network, a regional nonprofit serving western North Carolina, that crystallized the need for something new.
There, Ammerman helped lead a collaborative bringing together hospitals, health departments, and community organizations across 18 counties and the Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians. The model worked: shared planning, local autonomy, and trust-based communication strategies led to stronger, more coordinated public health efforts. When COVID-19 emerged, that infrastructure allowed the group to quickly launch My Reason WNC, a regional communications campaign that adapted federal and state guidance into culturally relevant, locally trusted messaging.
Yet, even as the collaboration succeeded, the system’s limits became impossible to ignore.
“We were constantly running up against the same barriers,” Ammerman recalls. “People were siloed, under-resourced, and overwhelmed. Some of our rural partners literally didn’t have the budget to boost a Facebook post or update their website. They were doing five jobs at once.”
Those inequities became even clearer as Ammerman connected with peers nationwide. At national conferences, she saw federal agencies and large institutions using sophisticated tools—often supported by corporate partners—to evaluate and scale health campaigns. Meanwhile, local communicators, especially in rural or under-resourced communities, were expected to manage rapidly changing science with little support.
The question that wouldn’t let her go was simple: Why should access to effective health communication tools depend on where you work or how big your budget is?
Arclet emerged as an answer to that question.
Built on years of real-world collaborative practice, Arclet is designed to help health communicators find vetted, evidence-based messaging; adapt it to their local context; collaborate with peers; and understand what’s working—all without sacrificing local voice or autonomy. Importantly, the platform puts humans, not technology, at the center.
Although Arclet leverages advanced tools, including AI, Ammerman is clear-eyed about how those tools are used. “Everything we build is grounded in public health values—co-design, transparency, and equity,” she says. Users opt into AI features, are prompted to review and verify outputs, and are encouraged to run messaging past people with lived experience and local expertise. Technology supports judgment; it doesn’t replace it.
That philosophy reflects Ammerman’s own background. Growing up in a U.S. Foreign Service family, she lived in places like Belgrade, New Delhi, and Hong Kong, witnessing firsthand how politics, conflict, and poverty shape health outcomes. Early experiences in victim services at Brooklyn Criminal Court and later work in India on maternal and child health further reinforced how deeply health is tied to systems—and how quickly burnout can follow when those systems fail the people working within them.
Arclet began to feel real, Ammerman says, when it started helping people she didn’t know.
One of those moments came when a public information officer at a small health department in Maryland heard Ammerman speak on a podcast. He signed up for Arclet, convinced his department to pay for a subscription, and later told her the platform helped him feel less overwhelmed—and more confident that he was sharing accurate, trustworthy information with his community.
“He said it helped him feel like he could do his job,” Ammerman says. “That mattered a lot.”
Early philanthropic support played a critical role in making those moments possible. Initial funding allowed Ammerman to move from concept to minimum viable product—testing ideas, learning from users, and building something that reflected real needs rather than abstract theory. Today, Arclet supports more than 145 users across North Carolina, with growing adoption nationwide and new statewide rollouts underway.
Looking back, Ammerman says one of the hardest lessons was realizing she didn’t need permission to build what she imagined.
“For years, I had this idea and assumed someone else had to create it,” she says. “It never occurred to me that I could be the one to build it.”
Further reading:
Inside the ‘Canva for Public Health’: Arclet Founder on Creating Tech for Health Communicators
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