The Rowan School of Osteopathic Medicine (Rowan SOM) is leading this project, in which 2,000 people experiencing homelessness in Gloucester, Atlantic and Camden counties will take the COVID-19 vaccine at mobile clinics. Rowan SOM is serving as the vaccine point of dispensing and the Atlantic County Sheriff’s Office is partnering in this work by providing its Hope One Recovery Unit to serve as a mobile clinic. Together with a number of community partners across the three counties including the Maryville Addiction Treatment Center, Gloucester County Special Services School District, Pyramid Health and Cooper Addiction Medicine, Rowan SOM is working to identify these most vulnerable individuals and establish temporary locations for the mobile clinic. By taking the vaccine to community settings and administering it to members of a hard-to-reach population, including the families of housing insecure students and migrant farmworkers, this program could create a model for providing equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines.

Rowan SOM 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.

In November 2021, Project Director Richard Jermyn reflected on more than six months of this collaborative work across Atlantic, Camden and Gloucester counties, and some ways to view these efforts as a step toward overall systems change. Read more, view photos and browse reflections from other areas in the state in this special compilation.