Vaccine Chasers go door-to-door signing up Columbia’s underserved for COVID shots
A couple dozen community members gathered in a semicircle on the steps outside College Place United Methodist Church in north Columbia on a recent Saturday to await their marching orders.
After signing in and receiving lanyards, the assortment of local residents, habitual volunteers and city politicians joined in song and prayer. An invocation for protection against the scourge of wild dogs ostensibly roaming the neighborhood’s streets elicited laughter from the group, and then they received their objective.
“Our only goal,” said Jeannie Jackson, the lead organizer, “is to help people get the shots in their arms. And that’s it.”
For the past six weeks, the group has walked the streets in some of Columbia’s historically underserved neighborhoods knocking on doors and helping elderly residents schedule COVID-19 vaccination appointments.
Jackson, the wife of Councilman Ed McDowell, said they don’t technically have a name, but sometimes call themselves the Vaccine Chasers.
Their early efforts have been wildly successful.
In just over a month, the Vaccine Chasers have helped nearly 1,200 Columbia residents get inoculated against the coronavirus, Jackson said.
Their work sprang from frustration over the technological difficulties many elderly people were having making appointments and the relatively low vaccination rate among Black residents.
“It started with a conversation between Jeannie and me,” said Kit Smith, former Richland County councilwoman and leader of the Coalition of Five Points Neighborhoods. “We were frustrated with the continuing message of how undervaccinated the African American community is. We knew that the reason was not really vaccine accessibility — it was enrollment accessibility.”
If they could get seniors enrolled and arrange transportation to their appointments, she knew they would show up and get the shot, Smith said. But first they needed to connect with a vaccine provider to help streamline the process.
Enter Providence Health.
Martha Scott-Smith, a Providence board member who had known both women for years, got them a meeting with CEO Terry Gunn. They told him what they needed and the hospital immediately got on board.
“They saw it as an opportunity to really make a difference, especially in the footprint around Providence Hospital,” Scott-Smith said.
The hospital is surrounded by several historic Columbia neighborhoods. It’s also close to the former site of one of the nation’s oldest public housing projects, Gonzales Gardens, and not far from the now derelict Allen Benedict Court, another public housing project shut down in 2019 after two residents died of carbon monoxide poisoning from a gas leak that forced the evacuation of more than 400 residents. The Lyon Street neighborhood, just across the street from Providence, was one of the areas hardest hit by COVID-19 in the early days of the pandemic.
Per the arrangement, the hospital allots the Vaccine Chasers appointment slots each week, usually over a continuous block of time, and the group fills them for people whose names they’ve collected during their neighborhood jaunts.
Over time, the process has become increasingly efficient. Jackson said she’s usually able to get people in for their appointment within a day or two of signing them up. Providence also contacts her when they’ve had cancellations because she’s been so successful at filling slots.
“I’ve got a waiting list with criteria, usually from the most elderly on down,” Jackson said. “I get people in the same day. It’s not a problem.”
If the person doesn’t have transportation, the Chasers arrange it or personally cart them to the hospital. COMET also has stepped up to shuttle people to and from their appointments for free via its dial-a-ride transit, or DART, service.
“You just have to call us and say ‘I need a ride to get the vaccine,’ and we work it from there,” COMET spokeswoman Pam Bynoe-Reed said.
The Vaccine Chasers canvass a different Columbia community or housing complex each week to sign up residents. They’ve hit the Lyon Street, Martin Luther King, Greenview, Historic Waverly, and College Place neighborhoods as well as the Christopher Towers senior living facility so far.
Before coming to an area, they make contact with its neighborhood council president, explain what they’re doing and ask for their blessing and support. The organizers then consult with the neighborhood president to map out a walking route and enlist local residents to volunteer in the canvassing effort. The belief is that people are more receptive to a conversation about getting the vaccine if they’re speaking to a neighbor.
Volunteers carry clipboards to jot down the names of people interested in getting a shot and hand out tote bags with surgical masks, hand sanitizer and other goodies. They also distribute neighborhood-specific flyers with information about COVID-19 and testimonials from local city officials and the neighborhood president.
Not all are convinced when the Vaccine Chasers knock on their door and try selling them on a free coronavirus shot, but they’ve made a number of conversions.
Olufemi Olulenu, a Martin Luther King resident in his 70s, was a vaccine skeptic and made excuses not to get a shot until he linked up with the group.
Even though he’d deferred his own shot, the fierce community advocate took up with the Vaccine Chasers last month when they came to his neighborhood and went door-to-door proselytizing about the importance of getting a jab.
“When I was out canvassing trying to get the senior folks in my neighborhood to get the vaccination, I had a true conversation with myself,” Olulenu said. “Hey, you’re asking folks to get the vaccination, but your behind ain’t got it either.
“I wanted my presence to be relevant, so I immediately told Jeannie, I said, put me on the list. I want to get mine. We met on Saturday, and on Tuesday I got my shot.”
Olulenu, who works at the Lowe’s in southeast Columbia, said he’s now taken to asking older residents and even store customers if they’ve been vaccinated. If they haven’t been but want to be, he’ll take down their name, date of birth and phone number to pass along to Jackson.
“It’s my everyday conversation,” he said. “Even today, I spoke to two or three people about it.”
Word of mouth is the primary way the group’s work spreads and why they’ve been able to get so many people inoculated in such a short period of time.
When the Vaccine Chasers knock on someone’s door and leave their information with a resident, it becomes like a COVID-19 vaccine cheat code. Residents share Jackson’s number and her scheduling superpower with family and friends, who share it with more family and friends, and on down the line.
The calls for scheduling help start coming in around 7 a.m. most days and continue well until the evening, Jackson said. Early on she said she was getting as many as 60 calls a day.
“I thank God we didn’t put anything on Facebook saying I could directly book appointments because it would have been crazy,” Jackson said.
Fortunately, Providence has been able to meet the demand the Vaccine Chasers have generated. The group also has forged partnerships with a few area Walmart stores and booked appointments at Brookland Baptist Church through Lexington Medical Center.
While time consuming, Jackson said connecting community members with potentially life-saving shots inspires her to continue the work.
She often thinks of her 91-year-old mother who wouldn’t have been able to navigate the vaccine scheduling process without her help and feels a duty to help other seniors like her.
“I think as long as we receive calls and feel there’s a need then we’ll walk the neighborhoods,” Jackson said.
Scott-Smith, the Providence board member, said she marvels at the initiative’s success and believes the model has the potential to be expanded beyond Columbia.
“For you to get a private hospital that’s willing to do this and you’ve got these folks from different walks of life that come together and move into these communities and then become associated with the neighborhood’s leader in those communities, that’s the beauty of it,” she said. “It’s a model that I think could definitely be replicated because it’s built on trust, it’s built on people that know the system and it’s built on people that have enough influence to move the process through the system. So everybody plays a role in it.”
This story was originally published March 28, 2021 at 5:00 AM.