Barriers, Long Embedded
“There’s a lot of conversations right now about the inequities with the vaccine, but the inequity started a long time ago,” says Paul Saldaña. Last spring, the veteran organizer and politico, formerly an Austin ISD trustee and a top aide to late Mayor Gus Garcia, reactivated the local nonprofit Austin Latino Coalition, which he co-founded in 2013, to address gaps in the local pandemic response. At first, those gaps involved access to personal protective equipment and COVID-19 testing across the Eastern Crescent; now, Saldaña and other community leaders see the same barriers to vaccine access, with a registration and notification process that’s mostly online.
The Del Valle Community Coalition is a member of Saldaña’s ALC. Its president, Susanna Woody, a Del Valle ISD trustee, says an online system is a challenge for residents without reliable internet access, or for Englishlanguage learners or the elderly without much digital proficiency. “It’s harder for our people of color … to access
and to understand what’s going on without having somebody walk them through [it] step by step,” Woody told us on a Saturday afternoon earlier this month.
We were standing outside a Valero gas station in Creedmoor near one of Southeast Travis County’s colonias – unincorporated areas that lack residential drinking water – as DVCC members and volunteers gave out food, water, PPE, diapers, and other essentials to residents driving through. The event was part of the ALC’s “Uplift Austin” campaign across the Eastern Crescent, with community groups distributing $200,000 worth of supplies donated by Procter & Gamble. Such relief distributions have been regular grassroots events for ALC and DVCC throughout the pandemic (and also during last month’s winter storm), so they could be promising places to connect with the residents hardest-hit by COVID-19 to get them in the queue for vaccines.
However, both Saldaña and Woody feel the city and county (which jointly operate Austin Public Health) are overlooking such opportunities, with potentially lifealtering consequences for the people they represent.
Woody, who with DVCC has long pushed for better infrastructure, fresh food, and health care facilities in Southeast Travis County, says the agencies that have vaccines to administer “need to make a bigger effort into getting out to the people, going to those communities, instead of having the communities come to them.” She and Saldaña both note that in areas that have historically been long neglected, working with the people and groups whom neighbors know is vital to gaining their attention
and then their trust. For vulnerable residents in Del Valle, even knowing the dangers posed by COVID-19, making time to get vaccinated isn’t high on the priority list, said Woody. “Going to work, feeding their families, that’s important to them.”
An online system is a challenge for residents without reliable internet access, or for English language learners or the elderly without much digital proficiency. “It’s harder for our people of color … to access and to understand what’s going on without having somebody walk them through [it] step by step.â€
– Susanna Woody, Del Valle Community Coalition
