by Chad Senuta
St. Paul’s in Kansas City, KS was recently awarded a $20,000 grant from the Wyandotte Health Foundation for the St. Paul’s Feeding Ministries Vaccination Project. The project began in October of 2022 and will run through March of 2023.
The church has operated substantial feeding ministries for many years including the St. Paul’s Neighborhood Pantry, Breakfast at St. Paul’s, and the newly adopted St. Paul’s Grab & Go program, which was developed in response to the pandemic to safely deliver core offerings of the pantry and Saturday breakfast. The Grab & Go program has also focused on distributing bilingual information to keep neighbors informed of available resources, including Covid-19 testing and vaccination sites, health clinic locations, and additional resources. The neighbors and volunteers who serve and receive offerings from these programs are diverse, multicultural, bilingual, and reflect the community surrounding the church, including many under-resourced groups.
The church had previously worked to improve vaccination rates in the county by working with local health department officials to arrange for all of the regular volunteers to receive their initial vaccinations in March of 2021, which included around 50 individuals. St. Paul’s has also advocated and provided ongoing information about vaccinations to those attending functions at St. Paul’s with regular bilingual handouts sharing availability, locations, and other relevant details.
St. Paul’s will use the grant from the Wyandotte Health Foundation to further improve vaccination rates in Wyandotte County by promoting itself as a vaccination site through distributing informative vaccine handouts to neighborhood businesses and residents, adding a vaccination station to its Saturday morning Grab & Go food stations, sending neighborhood liaisons into the community to engage with neighbors in residential and business areas, scheduling the Kore Lab Solutions mobile health van as a vaccine station in selected areas of need, and providing “at home” appointments for vaccines as necessary. The church’s goal is that 1-3% of the residents in the community will take more significant action by having a conversation with a liaison, visiting the St. Paul’s vaccine station, or scheduling an “at home” appointment. This would impact 300-900 members of the community surrounding the church. Contact the Rev. Dixie Junk for more information about how St. Paul’s is serving its neighbors and community.
835 SW Polk St.