In 2022, the County of Santa Cruz Health Services Agency (HSA) – Public Health Division was selected to participate in NACCHO’s CDC-funded Equipping Local Health Departments to Address Vaccine Hesitancy project. This project provided funding for three local health departments (LHDs) to conduct CDC’s Rapid Community Assessment (RCA) to better understand vaccine hesitancy, and develop a plan to increase vaccine uptake in selected communities.

Santa Cruz HSA – Public Health partnered with the Community Action Board of Santa Cruz County, Inc. to conduct a survey and focus groups to identify barriers to COVID-19 vaccination in their 0-14 population in South Santa Cruz County. They collected 503 surveys (342 in Spanish and 160 in English) and conducted 3 focus groups (two Mixteco and one Spanish) with 21 participants. Through the data collected, they found that their Spanish-speaking population had high trust in their health care providers, public health agencies, and community-based organizations. Their English-speaking population had highest trust in public health agencies, family and friends, and community-based organizations.

Driven by their RCA results, they developed a number of products to help improve trust and accessibility with the hope that these will lead to an uptake of COVID-19 vaccinations in this population. Products developed include:

• Addressing Vaccine Hesitancy Toolkit English | Spanish
• Community Health Worker Guide to Addressing Vaccine Hesitancy English | Spanish | Mixteco
• Short-form videos addressing community concerns in English, Spanish, and Mixteco
• Advocacy template to include information in additional languages

These guides and videos will be shared with community-based organizations who will promote the videos to the target population and a training is being planned to teach community health workers about how they can use the new guide.