By Aaron Allen, The Seattle Medium
The Central Area Senior Center (CASC) – in partnership with Safeway, First A.M.E. Church of Seattle, and Mt. Zion Baptist Church – is helping to make COVID-19 vaccinations for local seniors more accessible. The collaboration, which targets African American and other underserved communities, is designed to reduce disparities in vaccinations and address the frustrations that many seniors are facing as they attempt to get an appointment to get vaccinated.
According to CASC Director Dian Ferguson, the partnership with the churches was instrumental in making sure that local seniors had seamless access to the vaccine.
“The best way to do this was to partner with our local churches to divide up the numbers of vaccines to members in our communities, says Ferguson. “Having them join with us to register people, combine those registrations, make appointment times and it has actually worked out really well.”
Theron Hooks, an eighty-nine-year-old Boeing retiree, tried unsuccessfully to get vaccinated elsewhere, but was pleased to find out about the vaccination program as CASC and says the process was quite easy.
“Finding a place and scheduling to get a vaccine was troublesome,” says Hooks. “But I didn’t give up and found that my church was providing vaccines. So, I went through my church, First AME, and I thought it was a rather smooth operation.”
“My appointment was scheduled for 11:00 a.m.,” continued Hooks. “I arrived at 11:00 a.m., the place was busy with personnel. Social distancing with taped marks on the floor, very well set up and again it went smoothly and painlessly and personally I haven’t felt any reactions or symptoms.”
According to CASC, the criteria for their vaccine recipients are: They are members of CASC and actively have participated in their programs and activities for the past two years. They are in category 1B, 65 and older or they live in a multi-generational household — this provision allows for the other members residing in the house between the ages of 16 and 65 to be eligible to receive the vaccine. However, the additional members from multi-generational households who are under 65 will be limited and capped at 40 as CASC’s primary focus is on seniors.
Although they do not administer vaccines to the general public, Ferguson says that the program has been successful and she is happy that they’ve been able to help so many people get vaccinated in a very short period of time.
“I’m really excited,” says Ferguson. “We’ve coordinated 800 people to be vaccinated, primarily African American seniors, people of color, ages 65 and older, their caregivers.”
“We started these partnerships because so many seniors were talking about their difficulty getting vaccination,” added Ferguson. “I understood and we have a relationship with Safeway Albertsons and I know that they have pharmacies, so I started talking to them to see if we could start working together to set up vaccination sites.”
Places like the Central Area Senior Center are doing all that can to help seniors get access to vaccines. In this time of technology for some it can be a daunting task to find locations and register their place in line. But CASC and its partners have stepped in to aid our community’s elders to ensure their protection and health.
“The difficulty for seniors is that they are not the generation of technology,” says Ferguson. They are just not able to maneuver and go online and find a site and physically get there because many do not have access to transportation and so just trying to make it a less difficult situation as possible.” “I think there is a lot to be said on how community organization and community health-based organizations people working in partnerships can facilitate solutions in their own neighborhoods to assist people especially because we all get vaccinated and get our lives back and our economy operational,” added Ferguson.