As members of Community Catalyst’s Vaccine Equity and Access Program (VEAP), a vital component to our collective success includes sharing and gathering community insights from one another. While challenges to each region and community can feel unique, many of these barriers are seen across community-based organizations (CBOs). Sharing solutions can aid in efforts to vaccinate people who are underserved and overlooked. To share real-world approaches to these barriers, the following CBOs discussed challenges they faced and solutions they deployed to address vaccine hesitancy, language barriers, misinformation, and other obstacles that hinder a shot towards a healthier, happier life.
Check out VEAP partners’ spotlights:
2023 Partner Spotlights
El Centro Hispano
For over 25 years, El Centro Hispano has been addressing community-level quality of life needs by offering programs and services focused on six key areas: health, education, social, cultural, legal, and civic engagement. Each of these are considered a social determinant of health, meaning they have a significant impact on people’s health, well-being, and quality of life. El Centro Hispano is a partner that serves Hispanic and immigrant populations in Northeast, Central, and Northwest Arkansas with its main facility located in Jonesboro.
New Horizon Ministries, Inc. – NHCI (NHCI) is a non-denominational, independent, faith-based organization based in Hinds County, Mississippi. By prioritizing partnership and community outreach New Horizon Ministries began holding events, including community health and wellness fairs, where they would distribute free services like vaccinations, health and wellness screening, and food giveaways to engage local community members. These touchpoints created opportunities for New Horizon Ministries to develop and build relationships with community leaders, business owners, and health and wellness providers while maintaining a strong reputation within the communities they serve.
New Life Connection predominately serves rural, lower income communities with limited access to reliable transportation. By hosting mobile clinics and pop-up events, New Life Connection eliminated the hassle for community members to find a method of transportation and provided a safe and convenient location for its community to receive accurate resources and vaccinations.
Serving Northern Colorado to become the healthiest region in the healthiest state.
The Alliance serves 13-counties around the Northern Colorado and North-Eastern Colorado regions – many of which include migrant, refugee, and rural communities. Political tension in the region has led to resistance for the Alliance team in the form of protests and poor treatment at some of the clinics. However, the team persevered and created a strategy to center mobile clinics around free family fun and entertainment. This allowed them to provide their communities with the materials they needed to make informed decisions about vaccinations, receive vaccines, and help build personal, trusting relationships.
“Phone banking allowed our small team of three to educate and gather information from the Asian American community in a safe and efficient manner through one-on-one conversations.”
Ookyung Oh, Director of Hamkae Center
Text Phone Banking Success Stories
Helping to build an equitable future for Korean, Vietnamese, and South Asian communities in Virginia.
Hamkae Center acknowledged that the greater part of their community lived in remote locations, so it was imperative that they find a strategy to engage as many people as possible while saving time searching for and traveling to community hotspots outside of their immediate area. Through this need they developed a phone banking campaign, which was made possible by pulling information from public voter data to call 8,000 community members and ultimately speak to 244 people reaching the Korean, Vietnamese, and South Asian communities (specifically Punjabi, Urdu, and Hindi-speaking populations) across central and Northern Virginia. During these calls, the Hamkae Center team kept community members engaged by practicing empathy through active listening and using non-judgmental language; keeping conversations neutral and focusing on the facts when talking with people who were vaccine hesitant; and centering conversations around the community members’ experiences.
Increasing access to equitable healthcare services for Vietnamese and Southeast Asian communities in Philadelphia and South Jersey.
VietLead serves a community with a large majority that is limited-English proficient, uninsured/underinsured, and/or work in low-wage jobs, which means many of the typical channels used to disseminate COVID-19 and vaccination information did not reach these high-risk populations. In addition, the everchanging guidelines and information led to a high increase of vaccine hesitancy, and an overall mistrust of information shared through traditional outlets. VietLead saw this as an opportunity to connect with these communities through a more human approach and thus implemented their phone banking and text banking strategy. They found that this strategy allowed them to quickly outreach to their communities to relay information and combat misinformation around COVID-19 and the vaccines in their native language.
Dedicated to providing reliable and accurate resources for Immigrant communities in Las Vegas, Nevada.
Make the Road Nevada predominately serves Latinx, and migrant communities, among others, with many members working in non-union, low-wage jobs. A large portion of this community speaks English as a second language, with Spanish being their preferred method of communication. With that understanding, Make the Road Nevada realized that phone banking may be an effective strategy for them to use in their outreach approach and called more the 75,000 people. While the Spanish-speaking phone calls ran longer than others, they were often more likely to end in a successful call-to-action like signing up for a vaccine clinic or pledging to get vaccinated. The team also used a text banking strategy to follow up with people, share additional information, or to schedule additional time to speak. In total the organization sent more than 100,000 text messages. Throughout this campaign they became the “go-to” trusted location for vaccine information within the Latinx community in Southern Nevada.
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