CARLOS T. CARTER (Photo by Emmai Alaquiva)
This month’s Take Charge of Your Health Today focuses on a uniquely Pittsburgh initiative: The Community Vaccine Collaborative.
The Collaborative started when four community organizations, including the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh, joined up with Pitt academics to increase Black and Latinx participation in vaccine trials — and improve trustworthiness of research and healthcare among minoritized communities.
Today, the organization is known as the Community Vitality Collaborative. It’s objective and membership has grown to include a broader definition of public health issues, including not only COVID-19, but also, Monkeypox, mental health, gun violence, and much more.
Carlos, the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh is a founding partner of the Community Vitality Collaborative. What impact has the CVC had across Pittsburgh in terms of vaccine equity and health equity more broadly?
The CVC has served as a model for collaboration across our region. Bringing together roughly three dozen community leaders for each meeting, CVC serves as a key idea-sharing and conversation space. Organizations sharing similar goals can share resources with one another and establish working relationships that expand far beyond the CVC itself. It’s through the working relationships forged through CVC that vaccine outreach in the greater Pittsburgh region has been so successful.
We’ve talked a lot about trust and healing. How do groups like the CVC get at these concepts in a way that is concrete and actionable?
CVC, as a key place for leaders to discuss topics freely yet safely, establishes trust between its partners. In a region where so much discrimination is still present, spaces like CVC are crucial for our leaders — many of whom are from marginalized communities — to safely interact and share their prospective with others enduring similar challenges.
The Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh greatly expanded its vaccine efforts last year. Your team worked with a national partner, Get Out the Vaccine! to execute a telephone townhall. You also partnered with CTSI to offer more vaccines than ever at 2023’s Annual Thanksgiving Distribution. Can you tell us more about these two interventions? How do they relate to the earlier work of the CVC?
The National Urban League has partnered with the Center for Disease Control (CDC) and an organization called Get Out the Vaccine (abbreviated as “GOTVax”). GOTVax uses voter outreach tools like phone- and text-banking, door-to-door canvassing, and tele-townhalls to reach communities to educate them about the efficacy of vaccines and direct them to resources in their area.
Locally, the Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh partnered with CTSI to execute a GOTVax tele-townhall on Tuesday, November 28. Hundreds of community members tuned in and listened to and interacted with a panel of medical experts discussing COVID and flu vaccines. I served as host of this radio show-like event.
The Annual Thanksgiving Distribution partnership with Pitt CTSI allowed us to reach more than 900 families. We were able to address food insecurity during the holiday season and ensure our families had access to healthy foods.
We also leveraged these opportunities to provide our community with information and access to vaccines on-site. This was a key step to promoting community health and making sure people have access to resources that help them thrive.
I am very proud of this collaboration with Pitt CTSI and other community partners. More importantly, I am inspired by the impact it continues to have on our communities. At the end of the day, our work is focused on empowering communities and changing lives one person, one block, and one community at time!
Carlos T. Carter is President and CEO of Urban League of Greater Pittsburgh.
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