La Vacuna es Para Nosotros (The Vaccine is For Us) is a photo essay consisting of 14 photo stories created by Sylvia Johnson in collaboration with Garfield County Public Health. This material is a tool for local community organizations to share stories and build trust in the COVID-19 vaccine among the Latinx immigrant community. Shot as environmental portraits, these photo stories include families, restaurant workers, business owners, farm workers, law officers, housekeepers, medical interpreters, and students who each share what their experience with the COVID-19 pandemic has been like and what motivated them to want to get vaccinated. As we aim for widespread immunity through vaccination to stop this pandemic, this project humanizes the fallout of the illness, the process of getting vaccinated, and the protection the vaccine offers for being able to live and work safely again.
Sylvia Johnson is a National Geographic Explorer and a third culture kid who was born in Latin America and raised in the Roaring Fork Valley. She has been working as a bilingual contact tracer for Garfield County since November and received a small rapid response grant from National Geographic to create this vaccine equity storytelling project.
The diverse outreach within your community or organization is important to moving forward and getting closer to the end of this pandemic. This transparency and trust that has been put into the rigorous process of the COVID-19 vaccine is essential to ensuring the safety of your family, your community and yourself.
The first burst of photo stories and second burst of photo stories can be found in Spanish and English.
To read more about this project and watch a brief video of these individuals talking about their experience in the Latinx community during the COVID-19 pandemic, visit this site for Español.
For the same information and video in English, visit here.
