News Highlights Our Hope for a Healthier Future: Boston Youth Promote the COVID Vaccine

New Video: Hebrew College Miller Center Youth Help Promote Vaccine Awareness

Hebrew College is proud to be among the supporters of this youth-led video on the importance of getting the COVID-19 vaccine.

Several of the student speakers in this video are vaccine ambassadors in the COVID-19 Faith in Vaccine Program run by Hebrew College’s Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership and Interfaith Youth Core (IFYC).

This video is produced by We Got Us and Equity Now and Beyond — an immigrant group consisting of members from Haitian American United, Center to Support Immigrant Organizing, Agencia ALPHA, ACEDONE, Brazilian Women’s Group — that tackles COVID disparities in immigrant populations.

COVID-19 Faith in Vaccine Program

The arrival of effective vaccines marked a transitional moment of hope in the COVID-19 crisis, but two significant challenges emerged in the move from vaccine to vaccination: accessibility to and trust of the vaccine within certain subsets of the American population. While African American, Native American, and Latino/a/x communities are particularly ravaged by COVID-19, they also have less access to and in some cases are less likely to trust the vaccine. Politically and religiously conservative white communities, often evangelical, are also less likely to trust the  vaccine. National research shows that individuals in all these groups are more likely to be  connected to religious communities, which are vast sources of trust and social capital.

In response, interfaith leaders from religiously diverse institutions, including Rabbi Or Rose, Director of the Miller Center at Hebrew College, recognized that they had a unique opportunity to promote vaccine trust and increase accessibility. So last spring, the COVID-19 Faith in Vaccine Program was born.

Student Ambassadors began the program by participating in a training designed and led by IFYC and then worked to plan and implement accessibility and trust-building projects in high-need communities with which they are connected.

About the Miller Center at Hebrew College

The Betty Ann Greenbaum Miller Center for Interreligious Learning & Leadership at Hebrew College provides current and future religious and ethical leaders with the knowledge and skills to serve in a religiously diverse society. They work with clergy, academics, and communal leaders, as well as high school, undergraduate, and graduate students and seminarians.