Tutoring session schedules, personal finance events, job brochures-- the beautiful, light filled lobby of the McKinley Park Branch Library always hosts plenty of valuable public information. Now you can add Covid tests to the catalog. Every Tuesday from 1:30 to 3:30 pm, a team of Vaccine Ambassadors from the Resurrection Project hand out free take-home Covid tests, N95 masks and information about Covid vaccines.
“We’re here to give information about the vaccines and empower people, because this is our community,” said Cecilia Arellano.
Angelica Uribe, who has lived in McKinley Park for 22 years, echoed her colleague’s sentiment. She has three sons who have all gone to neighborhood schools, a fact that reinforced the importance of the program’s message to her. “It is very important that everyone get the vaccine and wear a mask, because of how contagious Covid is,” Uribe said.
The team of Cecilia and Luis Arellano, Angelica Uribe, and Maria Mercado have been setting up shop at the McKinley Park Branch Library since February of this year. Mercado said that around 30 or 40 people engage with the team at the library every Tuesday and Arellano estimates that they hand out about 100 tests or PPE items. Mercado also thinks the program has been successful at spreading word of mouth. “All the people that come every Tuesday refer other people to the program,” Mercado said.
The team’s work at McKinley Park Branch is supported by The Resurrection Project as part of the Chicago Department of Public Health’s citywide Healthy Chicago Equity Zones (HCEZ) initiative, launched in 2021. The Resurrection Project itself is part of a larger coalition of organizations serving the Southwest side for the citywide (HCEZ) health equity initiative.
“This is a collaboration with other Southwest side organizations,” said Araceli Lucio, Health Organizer at the Resurrection Project, “we are one of the sub-grantees.”
The citywide program is divided into six regions, each with its own “regional lead” in order to promote a “hyperlocal” strategy “to confront the social and environmental factors that contribute to health and racial inequity – with the ultimate goal of closing Chicago’s racial life expectancy gap”, according to the city’s Healthy Chicago Equity Zone webpage. For the southwest side area that McKinley Park is a part of, the regional lead is the Southwest Side Organizing Project (SWOP). Lucio said that each partner organization in the southwest side region is tasked with serving a specific neighborhood. The Resurrection Project is serving McKinley Park.
According to Lucio, SWOP convenes monthly meetings with all the partner institutions in the southwest side coalition to improve the quality of life for southwest side residents. “Our goal is to increase the amount of people getting the vaccine and to educate the community about Covid-19,” Lucio said. “We want to inform McKinley Park residents of the resources in their community.”
The Resurrection project has a total of 10 vaccine ambassadors currently working in McKinley park, working with neighborhood organizations like the library. The other McKinley Park locations for the vaccine ambassador tables are Blessed Sacrament Catholic Church, Horizon Academy, Namaste Elementary School, Nathaniel Greene school, and McKinley Park itself. Lucio says the program sometimes has events at businesses in the community. In addition to tests, PPE and information about the vaccine, these ambassadors can help direct residents on where to get vaccinated in their community.
According to Lucio the ambassadors choose the neighborhood organizations they work with. “All of them reach out to find places, they are empowered to make connections themselves,” Lucio said. This hopefully increases the connections between community members and organizations. Mercado also believes that the program helps provide the community with information that helps to empower its people.
Every Vaccine Ambassador in the Healthy Chicago Equity Zones initiative is required to go through a free, two-hour online training course through Malcolm X College. The course provides its participants tools to approach challenging conversations about Covid vaccines with the goal of persuading Chicago residents who may have reservations about the vaccines to get vaccinated. The course has been available since spring 2021 and is open to all Chicagoans. Both Maria Mercado and Cecelia Arellano said the course through Malcolm X was helpful.
Arellano said that the vaccine ambassador team at McKinley park offers a box of 2 at-home Covid-19 tests and information about the vaccine to anyone who comes into the library. “We have flyers, we have PPE including gloves, face-masks, hand sanitizer and wipes,” she said. They only ask for a resident’s address so that they can make sure they are serving local residents.
Arellano says that people who engage with the vaccine ambassador team are happy when they leave the library. And Mercado said that she and her partners have been thanked by many of the people who have walked away with masks, or tests, or information about the vaccine. “Thank you for the mask. Thank you for the test. Thank you for the information.”
There is no set end date for the program and Cecelia Arellano said she wasn’t sure how many more Tuesdays she and her colleagues would be at the McKinley Park Branch. She said they hope for at least three more months.
The continuation of the program at the library will ultimately depend on the management of the Healthy Chicago Equity Zones initiative. The citywide program was funded with $9.6 million in federal Covid-19 relief money through the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) to promote vaccine equity throughout Chicago, particularly in Black and Latinx communities. According to its website, the CDPH anticipates future money to keep the program going. The CDPH hopes it can then apply “the same targeted, community-driven approaches to other local priorities.”
Special thanks to Jose Negrete of the McKinley Park Branch Library for translation help.
McKinley Park Branch Library is located at 1915 W. 35th Street and is open every day. You can see more information, including the hours it's open, here.
The Resurrection Project is located in Pilsen at 1805 South Paulina Street. (312) 666-1323
All Chicago residents can take the two-hour, online vaccine ambassador course offered through Malcolm X College for free. For more information on the course and to sign up, go to the website here, or email at vaccine-ambassador@ccc.edu.
For much more on Vaccine Ambassadors, see this thorough article by Alice Yin in the Chicago Tribune. https://www.chicagotribune.com/news/breaking/ct-vaccine-ambassadors-covid-chicago-response-20220203-ghubdvgv5jfqhntvzoxrokocx4-story.html