Dear CommuniVax Community,

As we kick off the new year, we want to let you know that this will be the final monthly newsletter for the foreseeable future. We hope it has been a useful resource, and are deeply grateful for your interest and readership.

In this final newsletter, we're excited to share a final round of updates and future plans from each of our local teams across the country. You can read more about our local teams here.

We're also excited to showcase a new series of videos, including two masterclasses on ensuring the sustainability of health equity initiatives and presentations from our local teams showcasing their community health work over the past year. These videos will be archived at CommuniVax.org alongside our previously released reports, technical guidance, tools, and other resources. Spanish translations of our recent CommuniHealth Playbook will also be available soon on the website.

Thank you for supporting our mission to strengthen community health systems and promote health equity!

All the best,

The CommuniVax Team

We're thrilled to share updates and video showcases below from each of our local teams. In each of the video showcases, local team leaders introduced team members, clarified their local mission, identified local partners, and outlined the potential implications and impacts of their activities and findings to date. To watch a Q&A with each local team, click here.

The team in San Diego continues to address community health issues affecting Latinos in San Diego County. The team's Principal Investigator, Dr. Noe Crespo, has been awarded two R01s in partnership with Family Health Centers in San Diego. His most recent study focuses on vaccine uptake through a multilevel intervention. The other R01 project focuses on an intervention that limits the spread of COVID-19 in households when a member tests positive with COVID-19. These two projects engage Community Health Workers/Promotores (CHW/P) to deliver the intervention. The SDSU team also continues to work closely with the San Diego County Promotores Coalition to support the CHW/P workforce.

The Prince George's County CommuniHealth Team is dedicated to growing their HAIR (Health Advocates In-reach and Research) network of barbers and stylists. The HAIR Wellness Warriors will continue to spread knowledge of COVID-19 and encourage vaccination and boosting, but will also be expanding their focus to include services for diabetes, colorectal cancer, and lupus in the coming year. The Prince George's County CommuniHealth team is continuing to distribute the findings of the CommuniHealth Coalition and ensure that policy makers and health departments have access to best practices in community-based health.

The Alabama team's needs assessment has forged a partnership with a community-based organization in Birmingham, Connection Health, as well as with the Alabama Area Health Education Center and the University of South Alabama. Through this multi-institution partnership, the Alabama team hopes to convene and launch a coalition of community health workers (CHW) and CHW allies, and has initiated the process of expanding the coalition and forming working groups.

Masterclass: Public Health, Philanthropy, and Ground Level Pointers Local and state public health agencies, as well as local and regional foundations, are critical allies for community organizations and other stakeholders working to acquire and sustain support for the community health workforce and other health equity initiatives. Dr. Richard Krieg, the former Commissioner of Health for the City of Chicago and the former President of the Horizon Foundation in Maryland, provides tips on how to collaborate effectively with philanthropic and public health entities. (CommuniVax, 1/23)

Sustaining Health Equity Action: Partnerships Are Key for Local Groups. If health equity initiatives active during the COVID-19 pandemic are to continue beyond the crisis and address a community’s ongoing self-identified needs, then partnerships between community groups and state and local government are key. Drawing upon her experiences as a former assistant city manager and ongoing senior advisor on regional resilience planning, Ms. Arrietta Chakos argues for anchoring health equity as a community principle going forward, interrogates the “scrappy politics” necessary to make the possible, health equity work, and explains how partnerships can make funding more available to community groups. (CommuniVax, 1/23)