Addressing vaccine hesitancy in Baltimore City through a youth engagement/health literacy STEM initiative

Project Summary/Abstract University of Maryland (UMB) CURE Connections (C2) is an integral component of a minority STEM education pipeline in which West Baltimore high school students gain STEM enrichment including hands-on research and community outreach through a network of minority-focused college programs at UMB and its partner institutions. For this project, we will expand upon our current C2 curriculum by adapting, implementing, and evaluating a youth-engagement/health literacy strategy to address COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy and increase vaccine uptake. Central to our aims is a new capacity-building partnership with the University of Maryland Center for Vaccine Development (CVD), a nationally recognized leader in vaccine research that has been at the forefront of COVID-19 vaccine development and testing. We will integrate CVD expertise and resources into our established network of community, medical center, and local government sectors partners. CVD partners will support the adaptation of the Wellness Champions for Change-Student (WCC-S) curriculum to address COVID- 19, vaccine science, and promotion of vaccine uptake. This curriculum originally focused on obesity prevention and was developed and tested at UMB as a model for health promotion via youth advocacy/health literacy. This new vaccine-focused curriculum will be implemented during our 6-week intensive summer programming with C2 high school scholars. C2 scholars will then work with CVD faculty/students and UMB community partners to disseminate vaccine education in West Baltimore communities. In this proposal, we will use the adaptation framework, FRAME, to develop modifications to the curriculum to focus on vaccine hesitancy and access. Specifically, we aim to: (1) Adapt a youth advocacy/health literacy curriculum originally developed for obesity prevention using the FRAME adaptation framework to tailor content to address vaccine hesitancy as a strategy to increase COVID-19 vaccine uptake among West Baltimore residents. This curriculum will align with Next Generation Science Standards to provide foundational knowledge required to understand and translate concepts related to vaccine science and teach skills focused on health literacy promotion, youth advocacy, and community engaged research that culminates with a scholar-driven community project to reduce vaccine hesitancy. (2) Implement and evaluate the adapted curricula with a cohort of C2 scholar high school students via a 6-week summer program. The C2 scholars are the cornerstone of this proposal and function as credible conduits for dissemination of vaccine education from UMB to the West Baltimore communities in which they reside. The success of this program will demonstrate the feasibility of cross-sector partnerships and their potential to help erode structural racism that is at the heart of vaccine hesitancy and access disparities. Program adaptations to address vaccine uptake provide a model for its application to address future public health issues thereby creating a sustainable, community-focused infrastructure for public health promotion.