Greater Bergen Community Action (GBCA) is leading this project, in which up to 1,000 vulnerable residents in 23 of Bergen County’s 70 municipalities will take the COVID-19 vaccine at community-based vaccination clinics. New Bridge Medical Center is partnering in this work by serving as the vaccine point of dispensing. Through its Vaccine Equity Team, GBCA is training Latinx members of these communities with the lowest vaccination rates to serve as COVID Community Corps Ambassadors. As part of their training, these individuals are learning community organizing skills in addition to vaccine safety and efficacy information to educate their neighbors and help them reach a local vaccination clinic. While the Latinx community is a focus of this project, the ambassadors will also help interested members of the African-American, Asian-American, and Ramapough Lenape Tribal Nation communities to take the vaccine. This effort builds on COVID-19 Vaccine for the Homeless & Housing Insecure, an earlier phase of collaborative work that focused on vaccinating 1,000 people within three particular groups: 1) persons who are formerly homeless; 2) adults living in unofficial group quarters and illegal housing, and 3) families sharing a residence intended for one family. Through GBCA’s commitment to collaboration and partnership, this program could create a model for providing equitable access to COVID-19 vaccines.

Greater Bergen Community Action 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.

The Greater Bergen Community Action project team reflected on nearly six months of this collaborative work across Bergen County. Scroll down to check out their latest blog post.

Browse reflections on similar efforts from across New Jersey in the Summer 2022 collection of community stories by the Moving NJ Forward Learning Collaborative.