The Visiting Nurse Association of Central Jersey (VNA) is leading this project, in which 200 or more vulnerable people in Freehold Borough will take the COVID-19 vaccine at community-based vaccination clinics. The Freehold Area Health Department is partnering in this work by serving as the vaccine point of dispensing (POD). The VNA is collaborating across the Neighborhood Connections to Health network of community and non-profit partners, including Casa Freehold, to 1) provide information about the vaccine in multiple languages; 2) identify immigrants, day laborers, domestic workers and other underserved communities and 3) establish temporary vaccination clinics. 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 VNA 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.