By connecting with community members and countering misinformation, students served the hardest hit parts of the city. The City of Providence and Lotus Noire Health’s Health Equity vaccine clinic is held at the Scalabrini Dukcevich Center, located in a brick building in the largely residential Silver Lake neighborhood of western Providence. The clinic serves the community in many different capacities including educational outreach, COVID testing, legal services, and women’s health services. Inside, patients line up to check in at the waiting area and receive COVID tests and vaccines in a separate room. According to MPH student volunteer Leonardo Arriola, the clinic is able to vaccinate about 15 to 20 people in its three hours of operation. The clinic is open only on some Monday evenings.
The community served is part of Providence County, which has the lowest vaccination rates in the state, according to the Rhode Island COVID-19 Vaccine Tracker. Currently, 66.34% of the population in Providence County are at least partially vaccinated, with 59.91% fully vaccinated. In a county with over 600,000 people, this means that over 200,000 people in the area are unprotected against COVID. Blaise Rein, the COVID response constituent representative for the Mayor’s Center for City Services, shared that the clinic has “had quite a number of students from Brown volunteer with us throughout the pandemic.”
One of these students, Sara Riosmendez, works as a translator, checking community members in and filling out their vaccine cards. “These are focused clinics,” she said. “I think that pretty much everybody who has wanted to get vaccinated has been vaccinated, so [the clinic is] focused towards getting over misinformation and doing it through [vaccination centers] that… have a relationship of trust with the community.”