Healthy Communities News

With two COVID-19 vaccines now authorized by the FDA for emergency use, we’ve stepped up to help administer vaccinations across the country. So, for our first 2021 podcast, we’re taking you behind-the-scenes with Dr. Jocelyn Shrum, one of the CVS pharmacists responsible for training people across the country who make it all work. We speak with her the day after she and her team first administered vaccines in Nashville, Tennessee, where she gets vaccinated herself. Then we check in with Jewel Statham, a nursing assistant, and Julian Holland, a resident at Heartland Promedica in Ohio — who just got vaccinated as well. May listening make you as hopeful for the year ahead as they are.

As we look back on 2020, we’ll take you from Atlanta’s Westside, where its civil rights history still inspires today’s movements; to Boston, where a gutsy nonprofit that’s been using food as medicine for 30 years has reinvented itself in the face of the coronavirus. As well as Miami-Dade County where Branches is equipping students in new ways to keep learning. And downtown Houston, Texas, where the San José Clinic seems to have been preparing for a healthcare crisis just like the one we find ourselves in, since 1922.

In this episode, we head to Houston to learn about the integral role this small clinic has been playing in the community for almost a century. When the pandemic hit, the staff quickly adapted to ensure their patients could continue to access the care they needed.

The coronavirus has touched all of our lives in one way or another. Children, in particular, are in an ongoing state of flux. In South Florida, an organization called Branches has been working diligently for over 25 years to serve the neighborhood’s youth and their families. In this episode, we spoke with executive director Brent McLaughlin and Kim Torres, Director of Student Services, and Branches partner Rosa Santiago — as well as students Kelson Baptiste, Vicshonda “Vicky” Bellany, and Melvin Amaya.

Community Servings in Boston, Massachusetts, started in 1990 as a program to feed a small group of AIDS patients suffering from malnutrition. It has turned into a community hub that provides thousands of medically tailored meals each month, job training, and so much more. The COVID-19 pandemic has not slowed their work. In fact, it’s increased demand and CVS Health stepped up to help them hire a temporary workforce of kitchen staff and delivery drivers.

In this month’s podcast episode, we speak with David Waters, CEO, as well as COO Kevin Conner, executive chef Brian Hillmer, and Training Kitchen program graduates Ricardo Mercado and Jermaine McNeill, who explain how they make it all happen.

This year marks the 30th anniversary of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA), which is more important now than ever before. In this episode, we speak with David L. Casey, Vice President for Workforce Strategies & Chief Diversity Officer at CVS Health, as well as Duane Rohr, an advisor in CVS Health’s Workforce Initiatives department and Renee Smith, a graduate of the Abilities in Abundance program and colleague at one of our CVS Pharmacy locations in Baltimore, Maryland.

In the podcast, we explore these topics even more deeply with Breanna Lathrop. We also caught up with Dr. Bill Warren, the visionary who founded Good Samaritan some 21-and-a-half years ago. John Ahmann is the president of the Westside Future Fund and an Atlanta native who brings an historical perspective to the discussion before closing the loop with Makeda Johnson, director and founder of the Sisters Action Team, who draws from her faith and the power of collective action over individualism in supporting her community.

New Orleans is no stranger to adversity, and relies on its deep community roots to unite residents as they band together to respond to the pandemic. In this month’s podcast episode, we spoke to Danielle Taylor, a CVS Pharmacy District Leader and both of her parents, Jessie and Thais Ardouin, who were hospitalized at the same time with COVID-19. We also hear from Reinaldo Martinez, a CVS store manager, who is coping with loss in his family and leaning on his love of New Orleans, his coworkers, and staying busy with work to cope.

You can be young, look and feel healthy and still be at risk for a heart attack or stroke. Surprised? Healthy Communities News spoke with Dr. Mosca, a volunteer medical expert with the American Heart Association’s Go Red for Women movement, to get a better of understanding of women’s heart health. We also sat down with Jenny Petz and Nicole Murray, two of the inspiring heart disease and stroke survivors chosen for Go Red for Women’s 2020 class of Real Women to hear their powerful stories of survival and recovery.

To really know what a community needs, you have to live there. Talk with your neighbors over the back fence. See the issues with your own eyes. That’s what makes the Live Healthy Little Havana program a success. Neighborhood residents, working as community liaisons, are at the heart of the work to improve life for those in the community. And everyone’s got a seat at the table, from government representatives to health workers to lifelong residents. It’s a model that’s driving change — and one that other communities can replicate.