Stories and Highlights

Partnership for a Healthy Lincoln (PHL), in Lincoln, Nebraska, knew that in order to promote vaccination to COVID-19 to racial and ethnic minority communities and help them overcome vaccine hesitancy, the message needed to come from well-known, respected, and trusted members of their communities.

In the spring of 2021, when recommendations for COVID-19 vaccination were expanded beyond higher risk populations, many eligible adults in Ohio tried to get their COVID-19 vaccine as soon as they were available to them. However, many others facing language barriers and other challenges were not getting vaccinated as quickly.

Partnership is at the heart of much of the work that the nonprofit Gwinnett Coalition does to address the needs of residents in Gwinnett County, located in the suburbs of Atlanta, Georgia.

To solve problems facing individual communities, community-level outreach and collaboration are key. They are also the foundational principles for the Partnering for Vaccine Equity program, which supports more than 500 organizations in a shared effort to increase vaccine confidence and uptake via influential messengers. 

Korean immigrants and the wider Asian community faced significant communication obstacles when New York City began administering COVID-19 vaccines in the spring of 2021. Korean Community Services of Metropolitan New York (KCS) stepped in to help bridge these gaps.

Volunteers and staff at the Nepal Seattle Society have been working to educate Nepalese communities in the Pacific Northwest about how to prevent the spread of COVID-19. 

Christmas is both a sacred religious occasion and a worldwide commercial juggernaut, but for many Christians, December 25th marks only the beginning of the celebration. 

Asian Services in Action (ASIA), a comprehensive health and social service organization in Northeast Ohio, was searching for more effective ways to communicate vital information about COVID-19 vaccines to newly arrived immigrants and refugees from the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) communities they serve. 

Performer Jenifer Lewis has had a career of such breathtaking range that she’s been dubbed a “national treasure” by TV Guide. She has showcased her considerable talents in Hollywood films, hit television shows and Broadway musicals. Lewis delivered strong performances in such films as What’s Love Got to Do with It, Think Like a Man and The Preacher’s Wife. She also lent her unique vocal performances to animated movies—voicing “Flo” in the Cars franchise and “Mama Odie” in the Disney musical Princess and The Frog. 

Eduardo López has been producing Línea Directa—a Spanish-language television program dedicated to community outreach in the Washington, DC metropolitan area—for over thirty years. The program began in 1986 as a series of short public service announcements directed at the growing immigrant and Spanish-speaking population in the region. The shows then expanded to a 30-minute news magazine format in 1990—providing Latino families with information on their rights, as well as on important health, legal, education and social service issues. In 2000, Línea Directa began airing on the local Spanish

Throughout the pandemic, rates of COVID-19 infection in the Eastern Crescent area of Austin, Texas have exceeded those in the rest of the Austin area by more than 100 cases per 100,000 members of the population. The community organization El Buen Samaritano has led a successful vaccine outreach campaign in the Eastern Crescent area to address disparities in COVID-19 infection rates. 

In a world of rapidly diminishing attention spans, how can organizations successfully engage audiences to promote public health?

The Health Wagon, a nonprofit health outreach organization serving the Appalachia region of Virginia, had great success with an October COVID-19 and flu vaccination event.

The COVID-19 pandemic has shown us just how heroic our health care workers are, but the El Sol Neighborhood Educational Center took this notion a step further. 

The California Association of African American Superintendents and Administrators (CAAASA) brought together an impressive lineup of presenters to discuss COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy during its annual Round Up of Educational Leaders in September.