Chicagoland Vaccine Partnership a collaboration of multiple stakeholders from across the Chicagoland community dedicated to coordinating resources and learnings to ensure all Chicagoans can access the COVID-19 vaccine while strengthening a public health workforce to pursue health equity beyond this current pandemic. The focus of Chicagoland Vaccine Partnership is to amplify hyper-local, community-led, culturally competent strategies for equitable distribution of the COVID-19 vaccines. The relationships established and strengthened through this partnership will provide a more just way of ensuring health across the Chicagoland area. Incubation of Chicagoland Vaccine Partnership is supported by the Health First Collaborative at Michael Reese Health Trust.

• Define, identify and mobilize trusted messengers in communities prioritized by rates of COVID-19 spread and mortality.
• Engage community members in building a communication and education campaign, developed to align with the concerns and values of specific communities.
• Design a long-term model for community-led development of a sustainable public health workforce that employs bi-directional communication between the public sector and communities.
• Coordinate logistics and access to the vaccine across institutions and align messaging efforts.
• Create mechanisms to share out learnings and insights, bringing visibility and transparency to what we find and learn.

To date, $3M has been raised by sixteen local and national funders. Initial funding has been used to support community-led pilots, project management and administration and program evaluation. Ongoing grant-making activities will focus on community pilot programs to train trusted messengers and to resource hyper-local campaigns through community planning. Grant-making activities will focus on geography, sectors and populations—domains disproportionately impacted by COVID19.

Chicagoland Vaccine Partnership partners include health departments (Illinois, Chicago and Cook County), health systems, health providers, community-based organizations, community coalitions, faith-based organizations, volunteers and the philanthropic community. The Partnership is supported in project management by Partners in Health, a global organization working to provide health care to those who need it most.

Chicagoland Vaccine Partnership is currently composed of 113 organizations and 245 members and is growing every week. The majority of organizations operate within the city of Chicago and surrounding Cook County with several state organizations also at the table.