San Francisco, CA – You probably know someone who doesn’t want to get vaccinated. Dr. Kim Rhoads says the right approach can change peoples’ minds.
Rhoads is an associate professor in Epidemiology & Biostatistics at UC San Francisco’s School of Medicine. These days she’s more of a community organizer than a medical researcher.
“I wanted to share about our efforts in engaging the African American community around COVID-19 awareness, participation in testing, and now moving into vaccination efforts using a community-based participatory model,” Rhoads said.
Umoja Health is a collaboration of about 25 Black-serving organizations that came together under the umbrella of Umoja, which means “unity” in Swahili.
Rhoads described the effort as “service in the name of public health” and said that the model was first used in the Mission, a Latino district in San Francisco. “It was a community led COVID-19 test and response or test to care model where we test, bring testing into the community, engage the community through canvassing by community members and community activists, and community partners and then when folks test positive we provide a wrap around service,” she said.
A community wellness team calls patients every day and asks what their needs are in terms of PPE, cleaning supplies, and groceries. “We provide that for them so they can stay home and break the chains of transmission,” Rhoads said.
They found those who sheltered in place didn’t get sick versus the day laborers who did, so Rhoads tried using the same approach in African American neighborhoods.
“The community did develop a very rapid trust in us. I was very surprised by this and (they) called out to us when they found out that one community member had tested positive and they knew that this person had touched a number of households,” she said.
Rhoads got calls to come back out and provide more testing. When they did, they tested in the neighborhood on the street and they saw people knocking on their neighbors’ doors and telling them to come out and get tested. “And what we recognized from that is that a mass testing site was not going to work for the African American community but something more intimate would,” she said.
So Umoja Health workers started using a pop-up model.
“We mobilize with local folks who do door to door, hand to hand, face to face, peer to peer— answering questions about COVID and as we moved into the vaccination phase, the Alameda public health department recognized that as a major asset,” she said.
Just over half of Umoja’s testing resources go towards Black residents. Sixty percent of those people were first time testers. “They had never been engaged with COVID before so they knew when vaccines came around that we would be able to reach people they couldn’t,” Rhoads said.
Umoja is now an official community-based vaccine provider in Alameda County.
