Since 2021, the Partnering for Vaccine Equity (P4VE) program, funded by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), has addressed racial and ethnic disparities in adult COVID-19 and influenza vaccination. Within P4VE, the Building the Evidence Base for Promising Practices (Promising Practices) project supported national, state, and community organizations in implementing tailored outreach strategies to advance vaccine equity and uptake in their communities.

The project provided grants of up to $25,000 to support 18 P4VE-funded organizations across the United States to develop, implement, and evaluate the effectiveness of a promising practice in one of three areas: (1) media-based outreach, (2) community-based outreach, and (3) vaccine events and partnerships. Grantees began their six-month period of performance in August 2022. Target populations served by the selected organizations included Black, Hispanic/Latinx, East and South Asian, Middle Eastern and Arab, and American Indian communities.

Why This Matters

Despite society’s growing COVID-19 fatigue, outreach to achieve vaccine equity as part of a broader public health strategy should continue. Providing dedicated funding to support data collection and analysis represents a valuable strategy for improving the effectiveness of outreach efforts.

What We Found

Through implementing various strategies, grantees learned the importance of the following:

• holding events within community settings that are familiar to community members,
• developing trusted relationships within the community and working closely in and with the communities they wish to reach and serve,
• tailoring and targeting culturally and linguistically appropriate messages to reach distinct populations and groups,
• using diverse media and strategies to access different audiences and maximize the overall reach of messaging,
• promoting COVID-19 vaccine information and education within a broader public health or holistic health context, and
• countering the constant, rampant misinformation in social and print media shared among friends and family about COVID-19 and how to prevent and protect oneself from it.

Many of the lessons learned were not new; in fact, most were ones that P4VE-funded organizations have been learning over their years of work with the CDC. However, this project permitted participating grantees to focus a small but critical amount of resources on testing, gathering data, and evaluating their outreach and access strategies and, ultimately, to document and reinforce the evidence base of what works to achieve more equitable vaccine access. In so doing, grantees strengthened their capacity to design and conduct evaluations and collect and analyze data.

The lessons the grantees learned through Promising Practices can help other P4VE-funded organizations in their work and guide the CDC in making similar future investments in community capacity building.