Helping Community Organizations Shift COVID-19 Approaches for Next Phase of Pandemic

In the CDC Foundation’s latest Town Hall, more than 1,000 community-based organization (CBO) leaders and team members learned more about adapting their COVID-19 approaches as the pandemic continues to evolve. 

“Virtual Town Hall Part Two: Shifting COVID-19 Approaches for the Next Phase of the Pandemic” served to continue the conversation from our April webinar. The event featured three expert panelists who offered insights and strategies to help CBOs shift or reinforce key messaging about COVID-19 vaccination, long COVID, testing and other COVID-related matters. 

There were a number of learnings shared by the panelists, such as:

• “Information is rapidly changing, but do the best you can with the information that you have. Keep communicating updates on a regular basis and remain a trusted source of information for when folks are ready to make health behavior changes,” advised Noha Aboelata, MD, chief executive officer of the Roots Community Clinic in Oakland, CA.
• “In order to reach members in the community who remain unvaccinated, it’s important to remember that without relationships we cannot have change,” said Alex Fajardo, executive director of El Sol Neighborhood Educational Center in San Bernardino, CA.
• “We currently have ‘self-care days’ because we do get COVID fatigue from our line of work. It's important that we take care of ourselves as well as we take care of our patients and our community,” shared Stephanie Takamaru, project manager at the Arkansas coalition of Marshallese.

For more information, check out the full webinar:

The webinar was held in partnership with the Vaccine Equity Cooperative and Health Leads. It is archived—along with other webinars of interest—on our CBO Resource Page. 

This blog post is supported by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) of the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services (HHS) as part of a financial assistance award totaling $68,939,536 with 100 percent funded by CDC/HHS. The contents are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily represent the official views of, nor an endorsement by, CDC/HHS or the U.S. Government.