BioGRAPHY

An executive and strategist with 25 years’ experience, Jason Young has been recognized for outstanding work in the Obama Administration – at HHS and FDA – and with Blue Chip brands and NGOs.

Young has a deep commitment to public service, going back to 1999, when he was press secretary for the first black woman to preside over the Baltimore City Council. He later served at the U.S. Department of Health & Human Services – as Deputy Assistant Secretary for Public Affairs from 2012 to 2014. In his HHS role, he led the media and outreach effort on Obamacare, helping 8 million Americans secure health coverage and 7 million more get Medicaid. Then from 2016 to 2017, he served as Senior Advisor to the Commissioner of the U.S. Food & Drug Administration, where he focused on the opioid epidemic.

Young has dedicated his career to bettering people’s lives, especially through work to improve health care, boost mental health, close gaps and disparities in care, and help solve food insecurity. In May 2022, he was named president of Palladian Partners, a health-focused strategic communications and marketing firm. It 130-member-strong team is helping clients solve the biggest comms challenges in health care.

In other private sector work, Young is especially proud of his work for leading non-profits. Prior to Palladian, he served as AARP’s Senior Vice President of External Relations, where he and his team worked to:

+ Strengthen AARP’s voice in the public square
+ Build and protect the organization’s reputation, and
+ Highlight the issues important to Americans age 50-plus and AARP’s 38 million members – for example, protecting nursing home residents, fighting age discrimination (especially in employment), and working to lower the high cost of prescription drugs.

Young is also in the forefront of stopping proliferation of false claims on social media, which prey on users new to those platforms or who have financial resources vulnerable to frauds and scams.

Previously, Young was chief communications officer at the American Psychiatric Association, where he rebranded the 175-plus-year-old medical society to be more inclusive and welcoming to patients and consumers of every walk of life.

In addition to Palladian, Young has led two public relations practices – the health practice at the Glover Park Group (now Finsbury Glover) and the D.C. office of ASGK Public Strategies (now Kivvit). He has served as an adjunct professor of communications at Georgetown University. And he blogs on the PR field at “JY On PR.”

Long ago in a galaxy not too far away, Jason Young earned his B.A. in economics from the University of Maryland, College Park. In 2018, he earned a better GPA and an MBA from College Park, and was honored to be elected his class speaker. He lives with his partner in D.C., where he volunteers at City Wildlife and raises his loving animal children, Bailey (a dog) and Ponder (a cat who thinks he’s a dog).

*Opinions expressed on this site are my own and not my employer’s.

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