Meet the Fresno teens who are fighting COVID misinformation in the Latino community
This story is part of the Central Valley News Collaborative — a bilingual, community journalism project funded by the Central Valley Community Foundation and with technology and training support from Microsoft Corp. The collaboration includes The Fresno Bee, Valley Public Radio, Vida en el Valle, Radio Bilingüe and the Institute for Media & Public Trust at Fresno State.
Nereida Galvez Peñaloza, 17, recalls the worry, stress and fear she felt last spring while she and her mother battled COVID-19 infections. The McLane High School senior says she doesn’t want other immigrant families to go through that experience.
So when she heard about a new program for junior community health workers at school, she immediately applied. She is among seven “promoteritos” — named after promotoras, or adult community health workers — across Fresno who are working to dispel misinformation about COVID-19 and encourage their peers, relatives and neighbors to get vaccinated.
“As a ‘promoterita,’ it’s my job to talk about the coronavirus to my community, because they need to inform themselves and get vaccinated so they can protect themselves and their loved ones,” she said.
Throughout the pandemic, adult promotoras have provided critical health and educational resources to the Latino community, which has been disproportionately affected by the pandemic. Now, the “promoteritos” are becoming community advocates and harnessing technology and social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook and Tik Tok to encourage vaccinations among younger people, said Genoveva Islas, executive director of Fresno-based nonprofit Cultiva la Salud.
“The youth that have been recruited are largely youth from impacted communities and youth of color,” Islas said. “The biggest advantage in having them is definitely the role that they can play in creating appropriate messages, that they are framing things in the context to how their peers will understand things and that they can help answer some of those questions and remove some of that apprehension.”
The job of the “promoteritos” is even more important now, as the Delta variant continues to spread throughout Fresno County and children go back return to in-person learning, she said. With COVID-19 cases and related hospitalizations remaining high, Islas said it is critical that eligible children ages 12 and up get vaccinated to prevent outbreaks from occurring at school and within their homes.
Vaccine uptake among eligible youth across Fresno county continues to be lower than other groups, she added. As of Thursday, about 43% of children between the ages of 12 and 17 countywide were fully vaccinated, while just over half have received at least one shot, according to the California Department of Public Health.
Students train to be junior community health workers
Promotoras play an important role in bringing critical health information to the Latino community. Community-based organizations have long relied on promotoras to communicate vital health information in a culturally competent and effective way to Spanish-speaking communities. The pandemic kicked those efforts into high gear, as COVID-19 disproportionately hit communities of color, leaving socio-economic, mental health and academic challenges in its wake.
Cultiva la Salud launched an adult-based promotora program earlier in the pandemic so trusted community members could provide accurate COVID-19 information and education to the Latino community. The “promoterito” program, launched in July, is modeled off that initiative. It’s a joint effort created by several Fresno-based community organizations including Cultiva la Salud, The Fresno COVID-19 Equity Project and the Immigrant Refugee Coalition.
The first-of-its kind program is offered as an extracurricular activity for high school students within the Fresno Unified School District.
Here’s how it works: The students go through 40 hours of training with the Central Valley Health Policy Institute before being admitted to the program. They learn about COVID-19 and available vaccines, as well as health orders and safety guidelines and how to connect people to childcare, health, food and educational resources. All of this prepares them to answer questions and address community members’ concerns about the virus and vaccination.
They are then assigned to a community-based organization and serve as paid interns.
As part of their outreach efforts, the junior health workers hand out flyers and informational bulletins on where to get tested and vaccinated. They also conduct outreach at vaccination events and connect residents to much-needed resources including food and rental assistance, Islas said.
“It’s been a fantastic experience to have the influence of the ‘promoteritas’ guide our work,” said Islas. “They have that special insight and expertise about how to best serve their population.”
The promotora model is effective because the community health workers look like the communities they serve and become trusted messengers, said Susan Watson, director for the COVID-19 equity initiative Together Toward Health.
Now that youth are eligible for the vaccine, the junior community health workers can “lead by example” by getting vaccinated and sharing accurate information in a way that their peers and relatives can understand and identify with, she said. In fact, she said, they might be able to reach more community members than adults, and do so in a variety of ways.
“When you do work with young people and you give them the ability to be creative and lead, they often come up with things that as adults we don’t think of,” Watson said. “With training and support, there’s so much that they’re capable of.”
‘Promoteritos’ urge peers, neighbors to get COVID-19 vaccine
Gisel Gonzalez, a 16-year-old junior at McLane High School, decided to become a “promoterita” because she wanted to dispel some of the misconceptions about COVID-19 and the vaccine that she was hearing from her community.
She too was “a little skeptical” about getting the vaccine when it was first authorized, she said, but those fears dissipated when she began training to be a community health worker. She then persuaded her mother and other family members to get vaccinated as well.
Now, she encourages her peers to follow in her footsteps and talk to their parents about vaccines.
“Some parents are hard to convince,” she said. “But I think with us being at school, students can come to us to get more information and we can just try to convince them and their parents to get the vaccine.”
Becoming a “promoterita’‘ was especially important to Peñaloza because she wanted to help members of the immigrant community, including people like her own parents, who only speak Spanish and Mixteco.
“Usually in my community... they don’t understand the language so it’s kind of difficult for them to access a vaccine site or even make an appointment,” she said. “Some people in my community don’t even know about the different kinds of variants, so I think that it’s important for them to understand how they could get protected.”
She said misinformation continues to spread across the community because there aren’t enough people sharing accurate information in a linguistically appropriate way. But she’s hopeful that through her outreach efforts, more people will begin to understand the benefits of vaccination.
“Informing people makes me feel good and like I’m helping people,” she said. “It inspires me when some parents thank me for translating or interpreting and I think it’s the feeling of doing something right that keeps me going.”
This story was originally published October 1, 2021 at 5:00 AM.