Acenda is leading this project, in which 800 vulnerable residents throughout Atlantic, Camden, Cape May, Gloucester, Ocean and Salem counties will take the COVID-19 vaccine at community-based vaccination clinics. CompleteCare, Inspira and the Visiting Nurse Association of Central Jersey are partnering in this work by serving as the vaccine points of dispensing (PODs) for the six counties. Acenda is collaborating across its network of eight Family Success Centers and county, school district and community partners to provide South Jersey residents with information about the vaccine in both English and Spanish. In addition, Acenda and its partners will ensure that those interested in taking vaccine have access to vaccination clinics by providing transportation as needed. Those who take the vaccine will also receive after-care kits to aid a comfortable recovery from post-vaccination symptoms. Acenda will also offer testing services using a mobile unit and register residents who would like to take the vaccine. These efforts build on Community Partners Vaccine Coordination and Delivery Program for People Experiencing Homelessness, an earlier phase of collaborative work that focused on vaccinating 400 people experiencing homelessness in Cumberland and Salem counties. By taking the vaccine to community settings and administering it to members of a hard-to-reach population, this program could create a model for providing equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines.

Through this work, Acenda and its partners are among the nonprofits and service providers that have come together as the Moving New Jersey Forward Learning Collaborative to share accomplishments and lessons learned from this work with each other, with New Jersey Health Initiatives and the state, to benefit every community. Ensuring more equitable access to the COVID-19 vaccine originally connected these thought leaders as the New Jersey Vaccination Learning Network for over a year. In March 2022, the network renamed itself the Moving NJ Forward Learning Collaborative to better represent the partners’ systems-level thinking and commitment to applying the lessons from the past two years to unlock the doors to opportunity that marginalized communities face. Learn more about the collaborative’s expanded focus.