Advancing Health Literacy to Enhance Equitable Community Responses to COVID-19

The Advancing Health Literacy to Enhance Equitable Community Responses to COVID-19 seeks to demonstrate the effectiveness of the City of Boston implementation of evidence-based health literacy strategies that are culturally appropriate to enhance COVID-19 testing, contact tracing and/or other mitigation measures (e.g., public health prevention practices and vaccination) in racial and ethnic minority populations and other socially vulnerable populations, including racial and ethnic minority communities.

The Mauricio Gastón Institute partnered with the Boston Public Health Commission (BPHC) to evaluate the activities of the project. The Gastón Institute and the BPHC will develop and implement health literacy strategies for our focus populations. Some activities will be broad-based; others will use culturally and linguistically appropriate messages focused on specific groups and tailored to their concerns, hopes and interests—e.g., Haitian- Americans, Brazilian immigrants, younger Latinx men, LGBTQ youth, parents of young children.

Investigators:

Dr. Lorna Rivera, Executive Director of the Mauricio Gastón Institute

Dr. Eduardo Siqueira, Associate Professor at the School for the Environment.