After presenting its work to Dr. Anthony Fauci, a Sioux Falls nonprofit has been granted $100,000 to continue its COVID-19 vaccine outreach in the state.

South Dakota Voices for Peace was awarded the federal grant last month for its vaccine outreach efforts, especially within the multilingual community.

The organization’s vaccine outreach program has provided resources for non-English speaking residents of the Sioux Falls area so that they’re able to get the coronavirus vaccine while being well-informed. The vaccine literacy efforts have focused especially on immigrant communities, which have faced disparities both with coronavirus cases and vaccination rates.

“We were focusing on immigrant-owned businesses and heavy-traffic immigrant and refugee stores and neighborhoods. We provide myth and fact sheets in four different languages: Nepali, Spanish, Amharic and English,” said Taneeza Islam, executive director. “We also developed ‘know your rights’ information, so people knew they didn’t have to show their identification, which is a big deal to our undocumented communities specifically, and that they don’t have to pay for the vaccine.”

The grant will allow South Dakota Voices for Peace to extend the vaccine outreach program beyond the Sioux Falls area into rural communities throughout South Dakota, Islam said.

“We were already starting to establish relationships in more rural communities. So we’re just going to go back to those same communities now and assess where they are with the vaccine,” Islam said. “We’ll be going out into these communities, just asking them some questions about vaccine hesitancy and vaccine accessibility to see what the real issues are.”

In order to receive the grant, Islam presented via Zoom to Dr. Anthony Fauci about South Dakota Voices for Peace’s mission and its outreach program.

“It was an opportunity to just share the work that we’re doing. The administration shifted to really listening to the community, what they’re working on and how they’re making an impact in the vaccine world,” Islam said.

“It’s not really talked about locally, you know, there’s not much conversation about community access and vulnerabilities to accessing the vaccines. People like to talk about health disparities and have conferences, but this is the time to take action to make sure that those gaps are being closed. It was really awesome. And I feel really acknowledged for the work that we’re invested in doing and trying to make an impact in.”