Burlington--University of Vermont Extension’s Bridges to Health program is the 2023 recipient of the Steve Shore Community Catalyst Award by the North Carolina Community Health Center Association (NCCHCA).
The award is presented annually to an individual or organization in the United States involved in farmworker health whose work has incited positive change in the health and wellness of farmworkers. It is given in recognition of a former NCCHCA executive director for his leadership role in initiating several important migrant health activities, including the first East Coast Migrant Stream Forum, one of several regional conferences for agricultural worker advocates.
Bridges to Health (Puentes a la Salud) is a health outreach program that partners with local health entities and social service organizations to ensure that migrant and seasonal farmworkers, as well as other Spanish-speaking immigrants and migrants in Vermont, have access to needed health-related services.
“Our overall goal,” says Migrant Health Programs Leader Naomi Wolcott-MacCausland, “is to address health inequities at an individual, community and systemic level. We work with health and social service organizations to make them aware of the needs within their communities and help them identify and reduce barriers to improve access and coordination of services.
“Our staff, with the help of community volunteers, aid migrant and immigrant workers by coordinating health appointments and assisting with registration, financial assistance and health insurance paperwork. They also ensure the use of interpreter services, provide educational materials in Spanish and refer them to other community-based services.”
In 2022, thanks in part to a two-year grant from the Vermont Department of Health, Bridges to Health expanded its team, hiring six full-time, bilingual and culturally diverse community health workers. This allowed the program to increase its outreach efforts to provide care coordination services to both agricultural and non-agricultural migrant and immigrant workers.
The funding also enabled the team to go from serving just over 200 individuals (over 95 percent migrant farmworkers) per year pre-COVID to 852 individuals (64 percent migrant farmworkers) over the past year, a 274 percent increase from 2020.
During the pandemic, Migrant Health Programs received funding from the Extension Foundation via a collaboration with U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention as part of the Extension Collaborative on Immunization Teaching and Engagement, a national immunization education program.
The program used the money to launch an educational campaign in Spanish and English to provide information and resources about COVID-19 and address vaccination hesitancy. In addition, it partnered with district health offices and other health entities to coordinate on-farm vaccine clinics and health screenings in every Vermont county.
The program also addresses food insecurity and access by providing food through community-supported agriculture shares, food banks and food deliveries to farmworkers. Partnerships with local greenhouses and home growers have facilitated the planting of kitchen gardens on farms, so that the farmworkers can grow culturally familiar vegetables and herbs.
“Comprised entirely of grant-funded and philanthropically supported initiatives, Migrant Health Programs depends on funding from a number of different sources,” Wolcott-MacCausland explains. “It’s absolutely critical to our continued existence and success. With the funding for the Bridges to Health Community Health Workers program ending in June 2024, we are in the position of seeking new grants and gifts to ensure the continuation of that program, which has provided invaluable support to many of Vermont’s migrant and immigrant communities, including farmworkers, for their healthcare needs.”
For more information, visit https://go.uvm.edu/mhp.