In January 2022 we were awarded £391,000 from government to promote vaccine uptake amongst seldom heard communities, where there were low levels of vaccine take up. Funding is committed in the period from 1 January to 31 March 2023.
We knew that we could not deliver this project effectively by ourselves, so we work with the Cambridge Council for Voluntary Services and the Vaccine Access Partnership. Together, we have produced a community driven response that addresses misinformation, hesitancy and tackles barriers to vaccine access and wider health inequalities.
The Vaccine Access Partnership helped the project to mobilise quickly, enabling us to build on existing relationships and establish a community-based approach to delivery.
Champions have been recruited from local communities by well-networked community partners. They are trained and supported to develop the best plan for activity for engaging people in their communities around vaccination. This helps reach people not currently engaged by our existing activities.
Groups awarded grant funding:
- Cambridge Council for Voluntary Services
- Cambridge Ethnic Community Forum
- Cambridge Online
- Cambs Youth Panel
- Rowan
- Collusion Cambridge
- Museum of Cambridge
- Arts Partners
All stakeholders have an equal position on the project, which encourages trust and respect. We simplified a lot of processes to make applications and monitoring simple and accessible. Principles of systems thinking are also used to link activity to tackle wider health inequalities.
Learning from the project will feed directly back to our wider transformation, part of which looks at how we as an organisation work with partners and communities in the future.
We’ll be taking the learning from this project forward as we work closer with ICS, the county council and our community partners to continue to tackle health inequalities across the city.
