Where We Work

Since May 2020, we have partnered with Community Care of North Carolina to stand up and strengthen the contract tracing and case investigation workforce, while also helping inform state-level guidance to local health departments in partnership with North Carolina’s Department of Health and Human Services. We have also supported NCDHHS care resource coordination efforts, which have reached over 385,000 individuals via community health workers and directly provided social supports to over 38,000 households. Now, we’re partnering with the state to improve vaccine equity with a continued focus on historically marginalized populations and farmworkers.

In partnership with Community Outreach and Patient Empowerment (COPE), we are training and organizing 375+ contact tracers across Navajo Nation. This team assists those in quarantine and isolation access resources like food, water, transport, or medicine as needed. We also helped to develop linguistically and culturally informed training guides and contact tracing workflows, and provided career development opportunities for students at a local public tribal college.

We support a number of Pima County Health Department ​initiatives, ​including contact tracing, care coordination, and ​community engagement. We also perform data analysis to ​help ​guide decision making and inform local policy​, as well as advise on efforts to decentralize vaccine delivery. In collaboration with local CBOs, we are working to ensure Native Americans / Alaska Natives, communities of color, refugees, asylum seekers, immigrants, migrants, and individuals experiencing homelessness are all able to get vaccinated. To date, the Care Resource Coordination program has assisted more than 10,000 community members.

Since June 2020, we have partnered with the Fulton County Board of Health and CORE to provide guidance on strategy and operations in case investigation, contact tracing, care resource coordination, and home-based testing initiatives. We trained a cohort of field staff to conduct home visits to cases and contacts who could not be reached by contact tracers to ensure they have the food, personal protective equipment, and hygiene supplies they need to safely isolate. We are also supporting partners in planning for equitable vaccine rollout and developing a school-based testing program in Atlanta public schools.

We are partnering with the city of Montgomery and community leaders to launch a new community health worker program, help open a crisis center for unhoused people with COVID-19, and build a communications campaign to address vaccine hesitancy and access. We are also supporting the Mayor’s office in mapping vaccination sites to identify gaps in services and direct resources to ensure higher vaccination rates, promote a free rides programs for individuals with transportation barriers to vaccine sites, and continue engaging with a coalition of local community partners in a “Get Out the Vax” community mobilization campaign.

We are working with our partners in Immokalee to hire and train community health promoters who conduct household visits to counsel on COVID-19 prevention, testing, transmission, symptoms, isolation, and quarantine, and to connect individuals to resources that address their basic needs. Through these partnerships, we have connected the migrant farmworkers community to vital social supports, including cash transfers for food, utilities, and housing assistance for workers who tested positive for COVID-19. We also collaborated with local partners to host mobile testing events in residential areas, community centers, and  with  nearby trusted community organizations.

We provide strategy and operational support to our partners at CORE to deploy community-based mobile testing units, rotating “static” testing units, and school-based testing units. We support our partners at these sites with resource coordination and evaluating the impact of a new social needs screen tool for individuals who get tested. We are also partnering with CORE to help the New Orleans Department of Public Health to codify and share best practices for an equitable pandemic response, as well as lessons learned in vaccine rollout. Photo by Crista Rock for NOLA Ready

Alongside community, government, and academic partners in Ohio, we are working to eliminate geography and transportation barriers by using spatial mapping to identify gaps in vaccine access and provide recommendations on the placement of mobile units.

In Toronto, we supported an indigenous team in developing a testing, contact tracing, and support site for the 70,000+ urban indigenous living in the city.

Since April 2020, we have supported the city to monitor and analyze test positivity rates, inform reopening and response policies, and stand up a Care Resource Coordination team to provide support to individuals in isolation and quarantine. We helped the city estimate COVID-19 workforce needs, synthesize equity-driven metrics, and establish a real-time information management system for contact tracing and case investigation. Now, we are supporting the city’s efforts to expand vaccination and bring vaccines directly to residents through static and pop-up sites.

In Connecticut, we developed a vaccine toolkit to help the public sector increase equitable vaccine access. We used mapping provided by the Connecticut Department of Health to organize a trusted messenger forum in which hundreds of community leaders were equipped to share information with their communities, as well as engage in dialogue to mitigate access challenges.

In New Bedford, we are supporting the City’s community vaccination program by focusing on specific segments of the local population, utilizing low-tech tools and local knowledge to reach and assist New Bedford residents who are less likely to receive the vaccine because of barriers like access to technology and English language proficiency. We are also partnering with the New Bedford Health Department’s leadership team to hire, train, and mentor a contact tracer, an epidemiologist, and multilingual community liaisons.

We began working with the Illinois Department of Public Health in May 2020 when the Governor’s office requested help after seeing the success of PIH’s contact tracing work in Massachusetts. Since then, we have deepened our work, sharing best practices for care resource coordination, scaling and refining contact tracing across the state, and ensuring equitable vaccine distribution.

In Cook County, where COVID-19 has had a disproportionate impact on Latinx and Black communities, we supported the county public health department to strengthen existing health systems, engage local communities, and promote equity across all phases of vaccine rollout, and we supported isolation and quarantine through strengthening care resource coordination efforts.

In the Chicago region, we are convening and supporting the Chicagoland Vaccine Partnerships, a consortium of more than 100 multi-sector organizations, to help increase community understanding of and access to vaccines. We developed and launched a Speakers Bureau who serve as resources for community-based organizations and grassroots organizations offering vaccine education, town halls, and staff trainings. These trusted messengers receive training on how to address community questions and hesitancy through open dialogue.