This spring, HCDI collaborated with numerous partners to put together a successful vaccine clinic at our 437 Bay Street Resident Resource Center. Thanks to the efforts of Housing Management Resources, the Bay Area Neighborhood Council, the City of Springfield, Curative, and Dr. Sly Douglas, over 4000 people in the Bay area neighborhood were vaccinated at the clinic.
“This clinic was an amazing accomplishment on the part of Curative and our community … extremely successful,” Health and Human Services (HHS) Commissioner Helen Caulton-Harris said. “[HCDI] opening up [its] doors, allowing us to come in, allowing us to be in a neighborhood clinic … I am so appreciative to the community response.”
The doors opened at the end of March, and the clinic ran through the third week of June. Notably, residents did not have to make appointments. They could stop by anytime to get their vaccine. Water and light refreshments were provided as well. Gwendolyn Smith, President of the Bay Area Neighborhood Council, went door-to-door in her neighborhood, along with others, passing out cards to spread the word. “They don’t have to go to the Eastfield Mall; they can come here, walk here, and we supply everything.” She said that the neighborhood clinic was in such high demand that at one point, lines were all the way down to the senior facility next door. Soon after the doors opened, clinic staff were vaccinating 200 people per day. The clinic then expanded hours to operate later in the afternoon and include Saturdays, in order to accommodate more people.
Nancy Reno, a Vice President with Housing Management Resources (HMR), our property management partner, initially coordinated this effort. She emphasized that this project aligns perfectly with the mission of HCDI’s Resident Resource Center, an 4000-square-foot space built in 2018 for the purpose of serving the needs of the surrounding community. “We’re doing what we intended to do with this community resource center. It’s one thing to have a vision and another to have that vision actually happening.”
HMR ran vaccine clinics at a dozen other properties as well. When focusing on Home City, HMR identified the need in the community and knew that the 437 Bay Street site was very walkable for people in the neighborhood. “It was a real collaborative effort by the management company and ownership at Home City to provide the space and use the space for what it was really intended for,” Reno said, “Who knew there was going to be a pandemic?”
Curative was the health services company that administered the vaccines, led by Dr. Sly Douglas, their Northeast regional lead. From the start of the pandemic, Curative has been partnering with communities to make reliable and rapid health services easier to access for everyone. They initially partnered with the state to run the Eastfield Mall mass vaccination site. Their mission is to keep people “safe, healthy, and informed.” Dr. Sly Douglas was the main liaison for this effort, and most of the coordinators emphasized that he was a critical part to making this happen, in his willingness to partner with the city.
From the perspective of the city, this vaccine site made a big difference in outreach to the community, from the large max site at the Eastfield Mall, to the neighborhoods themselves.
“We’re taking it right into our neighborhoods . . . People are familiar with it, they feel comfortable, it’s welcoming,” Mayor Domenic J. Sarno said of the collaborative effort. “We’ve worked with HCDI a number of times with housing initiatives and now for the vaccination. It’s been a great partnership.”
In sync with the last day of the clinic, a Juneteenth celebration was held at the Raymond A. Jordan Senior Center on Saturday June 19th. Vaccines were offered by Curative, and HCDI was a sponsor along with numerous other organizations.
“Every neighborhood needed to have convenient access to a vaccination clinic,” Jesse Lederman, Springfield City Councilor-at-Large said. “Having the vaccination clinic right on Bay Street changed the vaccination effort in a very positive way . . . Without the efforts of those organizations and without that location, we’d be in a very different place than we are today.”