About
About The Healthy Project
Public health conversations, stories, and resources that connect health equity, community health, prevention, culture, policy, and lived experience.
The Healthy Project Podcast is a public health show built on conversations. Since 2020 it has published 198 episodes with researchers, advocates, clinicians, community leaders, public health officials, and people describing their own experience of the health system — recorded from Des Moines, Iowa, and distributed everywhere people listen.
The premise is simple. Health is shaped by more than individual choices. It is shaped by housing, income, transportation, food, safety, education, care access, stress, and the way institutions treat people. Those forces are hard to see in aggregate data and impossible to miss in a person's story. The show sits with the people who study them and the people who live them, at length, without reducing either to a statistic.
Why the show exists
Public health is often communicated in the language of surveillance reports and strategic plans. That language is precise and almost nobody outside the field reads it. Meanwhile the people doing the most consequential work — community health workers, program directors, nurses, organizers, researchers embedded in neighborhoods — rarely get an hour to explain what they have learned.
The Healthy Project exists to close that gap: to make public health legible without making it shallow, and to give practitioners a place to be heard in full. That is what stories that make public health human means in practice.
What the show covers
Every episode is categorized by the issues it actually addresses, so the archive can be read as a body of work rather than a feed:
- Health Equity
- Community Health
- Mental Health
- Public Health Policy
- Social Drivers of Health
- Prevention
- Chronic Disease
- Environmental Health
- Health Technology
- Culture & Storytelling
- Healthcare Access
Conversations move between research, policy, program design, culture, and lived experience — often inside the same episode, because that is how these issues actually intersect.
Who it's for
The audience is people who work on health, and people who are trying to understand what is happening to their own communities:
- Public health professionals
- Health system and hospital leaders
- Community-based organizations and nonprofits
- Researchers and academics
- Clinicians and care teams
- Foundation and philanthropy staff
- Policy and government affairs teams
- Students and early-career professionals
No public health background is required. If you have ever wondered why the health of two neighborhoods a few miles apart looks nothing alike, the show is for you.
The host
About Corey Dion Lewis
Corey Dion Lewis is a public health storyteller, podcast host, and the founder of The Healthy Project. He started the show in 2020 to bring the conversations happening inside public health to people outside of it.
His work sits at the intersection of prevention, community health, health equity, and media: interviewing the researchers and practitioners shaping health outcomes, producing video and audio for mission-driven organizations, and speaking to audiences about what it takes to communicate health in a way people trust.
He works from Des Moines, Iowa, and hosts every episode of the show.
Newsletter
Public health worth paying attention to.
One conversation. Key takeaways. Stories, research, and resources you can use.