Public health ambassadors help Durham businesses stay open safely during the COVID-19 pandemic.
In the spring of 2020, Durham Mayor Steve Schewel invited local scientists to meet with him and share their thoughts as to how the community could endure the health and economic stresses of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic.
A few months later, the mayor asked Kurt Ribisl, PhD, if the Gillings School’s Department of Health Behavior would get involved with Durham’s Back on the Bull campaign, where businesses could publicly share their health and safety practices in hopes of reassuring a wary public that they were safe places to visit. Ribisl turned to Master of Public Health student Marlyn Pulido to partner on the project, hiring her full-time to lead the work upon graduation.
Working with Patsy Polston, PhD, Yesenia Merino, PhD, and a team of master’s students, Pulido and Ribisl led a phased, community health-based plan focusing specifically on assisting Black-owned and Hispanic-owned businesses in Durham. Partnering with local nonprofit El Centro Hispano and using grant funds from the city, they hired and trained 14 local multilingual, multicultural community members to become Durham Health Ambassadors.
From sharing information on the latest mandates and best practices, to leveraging the University’s ability to order personal protective equipment when it was in short supply, to personally ordering and delivering masks and hand sanitizer, the ambassadors worked closely with local businesses throughout the next several months to reduce their risks and help them stay open for business.
When COVID-19 vaccines began to be distributed, appointments were extremely difficult to come by — and Black, Latinx and Indigenous populations already had disproportionately higher rates of COVID-19 illness and death than white populations. The Ambassadors worked to reduce that disparity, focusing on making appointments for essential workers at the grocery stores, gas stations and restaurants they had gotten to know over the summer.
As vaccinations became more widely available, the group’s focus shifted from making appointments to promoting equitable access and ensuring Spanish-language access at vaccine events. The Ambassadors joined the Durham Vaccine Equity Advisory Coalition, a group of nine local community organizations trying to address disparities in vaccine access. By the end of the project, those large gaps in vaccine rates were significantly narrowed or closed altogether.
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