The Holly City Development Corporation (HCDC) is leading this project, in which up to 800 vulnerable Millville residents in Center City and the surrounding neighborhoods will take the COVID-19 vaccine at community-based vaccination clinics. Together with the Cumberland County Health Department, HCDC is conducting outreach activities in communities that have limited access to transportation, provide information about the vaccines to residents and register interested individuals in their homes. In addition, HCDC is leveraging its partnerships to coordinate pop-up vaccination clinics in the community. Those who take the vaccine will also receive after-care kits to aid a comfortable recovery from post-vaccination symptoms. 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, the Holly City Development Corporation 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.