Baltimore among Five U.S. Cities Selected by Rockefeller to Help Meet its National Equity Vaccination Goal of 70 Million Vaccinations to People of Color by July
(Read the Baltimore Sun story on the Baltimore Equitable Vaccination Initiative)
BALTIMORE | April 13, 2021 – The Rockefeller Foundation has selected Baltimore as one of five pilot cities to launch a historic $20 million Equity-First Vaccination Initiative to improve the vaccination rate among communities of color, which have been disproportionately impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic.
With Rockefeller’s support, Open Society Institute-Baltimore (OSI-Baltimore) will launch the Baltimore Equitable Vaccination Initiative to provide medically sound, culturally competent information about vaccine safety and improve distribution and delivery mechanisms to reach disconnected Baltimoreans through pop-up vaccination sites and mobile clinics across the city.
In addition to on-the-ground support, the Initiative will support resource hubs to assist in addressing access to health care, housing, and other critical health-sustaining needs and advocate for systemic change that will address community infrastructure and social service needs to reduce health disparities.
“The Rockefeller Foundation has been a key ally to Baltimore and OSI from the early days of Covid-19 when it helped to create Baltimore Health Corps, an initiative to recruit, train, and employ more than 300 residents who were jobless due the pandemic as contact tracers,” said Danielle Torain, Director of Open Society Institute-Baltimore. “We are proud to continue this partnership through the Baltimore Equitable Vaccination Initiative, which will ensure that communities have equitable access to the vaccines, information, and other resources.”
OSI-Baltimore will partner with a number of local, community-based organizations and government agencies to ensure that disproportionately impacted communities, including Black, Indigenous and people of color (BIPOC) and low-wage essential workers, are adequately served.
“Because of existing structural inequalities—including health care access, wealth gaps and systematic racism—people of color have been much more likely to both contract Covid-19 and die from this virus,” said Otis Rolley, Senior Vice President for the U.S. Equity and Economic Opportunity Initiative at The Rockefeller Foundation and a former member of OSI-Baltimore’s Advisory Board. “The Rockefeller Foundation is launching this initiative because a vaccination strategy that does not seek to directly combat inequities stands to further entrench them.”
Representing less than one-third of the 63 million people who are now fully vaccinated in the United States, communities of color are twice as likely to die from Covid-19 and three times as likely to be hospitalized as white Americans. To close this gap, The Rockefeller Foundation will initially collaborate with five organizations to deploy equity-first, hyper-local public health interventions in five U.S. cities: Baltimore, Md.; Chicago, Ill.; Houston, Texas; Newark, N.J.; Oakland, Calif. During the second phase of the Initiative, the Foundation will collaborate with several national organizations to take lessons learned from the five cities and ensure that at least 70 million people of color are vaccinated by July 2021.
Equity-First Models to Increase Access and Confidence
The Equity-First Vaccination Initiative will demonstrate and scale hyper-local, community-led programs to improve vaccine access and accurate information across five cities that represent 5 million of the nation’s 95 million adults of color. Learnings from the initiative in Baltimore and the other four U.S. cities will help inform strategies across the country to increase access to Covid-19 vaccinations in communities of color, contributing to a collective, national north star goal of ensuring at least 70 million people of color will be fully vaccinated by July 2021.
In this first phase of the initiative, the Foundation will provide grant funding to five anchor organizations: Open Society Institute-Baltimore, The Chicago Community Trust, Houston in Action, United Way of Greater Newark, and Roots Community Health Center in Oakland. These organizations will provide resources and additional support to over 100 community-based organizations (CBOs) that will then lead hyper-local community mobilization efforts to better address questions and concerns on when, why, and where to get the vaccine, increase vaccine access, and rollout additional community vaccination sites. In addition, the CBOs will also be connected with public health communications, dis/misinformation, and health marketing experts who will provide accurate, evidence-based information to improve their ability each to address questions and concerns about the Covid-19 vaccines.
An initial poll issued by HIT Strategies, with support from The Rockefeller Foundation, of people of color in Baltimore found that while the majority of respondents (74 percent) want to get vaccinated when eligible, a majority (58 percent) do not know how to get vaccinated. In addition, the poll confirmed systemic health issues facing people of color in Baltimore today: one in five respondents have trouble getting care when needed and felt disrespected when getting care. Fourteen percent of Baltimoreans said they see a doctor less than once a year.
“We want everyone to be confident in the safety and efficacy of the vaccines—but that will only happen if everyone has access to them,” said Greg Johnson, Managing Director for the Equity and Economic Opportunity Initiative at The Rockefeller Foundation. “People need to see the benefits to their friends, families and loved ones, and be able to get the vaccine from a provider and a place they trust.”
Best practices and impact-to-date from these equity-first models will be synthesized and shared nationally through cross-sector networks, advocacy efforts, convenings, and publications to ensure that the most effective solutions are actively adopted to effectively remove racial vaccination disparities:
- Knowledge generation: The Foundation will surface barriers and promising solutions observed both nationwide and in our demonstration pilots.
- Networks: The Foundation will regularly share data and learning with national networks, including the Pandemic Solutions Group (PSG) and the State and Territory Alliance on Testing, to crowd in support from other public, private, and civil society partners to scale models that work.
- Advocacy: The Foundation will work alongside federal, state, and local governments to further expand awareness about the Initiative’s initial findings and impact as well as advocate for critical policies, targeted resources, and the use of new strategies and tools in order to reach 70 million people of color by July 2021.
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About OSI-Baltimore
As the only U.S. field office of the Open Society Foundations, Open Society Institute-Baltimore focuses on the root causes of three intertwined problems in our city and state: drug addiction, an overreliance on incarceration and obstacles that keep youth from succeeding both inside and outside the classroom. We also support a growing corps of social entrepreneurs committed to underserved populations in Baltimore. Visit us on our website: http://www.osibaltimore.org/
About The Rockefeller Foundation
The Rockefeller Foundation advances new frontiers of science, data, and innovation to solve global challenges related to health, food, power, and economic mobility. As a science-driven philanthropy focused on building collaborative relationships with partners and grantees, The Rockefeller Foundation seeks to inspire and foster large-scale human impact that promotes the well-being of humanity throughout the world by identifying and accelerating breakthrough solutions, ideas, and conversations. For more information, sign up for our newsletter at rockefellerfoundation.org and follow us on Twitter @RockefellerFdn.
Media Contacts:
Evan Serpick
Open Society Institute-Baltimore
evan.serpick@opensocietyfoundations.org
1 (347) 623-8587
Davina Dukuly
The Rockefeller Foundation
1 (646) 465-0885
