Share, Trust, Organize, Partner: The COVID-19 California Alliance (STOP COVID-19 CA) is a statewide collaborative that partners with local community organizations to build community capacity, conduct research, create accessible training materials, develop policy recommendations for improving information and reducing misinformation, and increasing diversity and accessibility of vaccine clinical trials, and vaccination. 

The collaborative, led by the UCLA CTSI Community Engagement & Research Program, includes all California CTSAs—UC Los Angeles, UC Davis, UC Irvine, UC San Diego, UC San Francisco, Scripps Health, Stanford University and USC. In addition, three RCMI-eligible institutions, UC Riverside, UC Merced and San Diego State University, plus over 70 community partners throughout the state participate in the collaborative. 

The collaborative goals include:

• Create a statewide collaborative to understand current academic-community partnered efforts to educate, research, and promote COVID-19 risk and prevention information, vaccine trial participation and vaccination readiness with high-risk communities.
• Obtain community input into barriers and facilitators to understanding COVID-19, participating in vaccine and therapeutic trials and vaccination by region, ethnicity, and demographic characteristics.
• Develop and evaluate training for academic-community partnerships to deploy “best practices” to engage high risk and/or hard to reach communities
• Conduct community-engaged research to gain knowledge on barriers and facilitators for health equity on COVID-19 risk and prevention, (mis)information, vaccine trial participation, and vaccination readiness.

 Visit the STOP COVID-19 CA website for more information and developed resources.

Policy Brief COVID-19 Vaccine Hesitancy and Acceptability in Multiethnic Communities: Implications for Public Health Policy, Messaging, and Community Outreach STOP COVID-19 CA conducted an exploratory study on vaccine hesitancy in Los Angeles communities to provide insights for public health vaccine policy, messaging, and outreach.  Recommendations include investing in community-based engagement, validation of and listening to concerns leading to hesitancy, access to timely and accessible information from credible sources, increased data transparency for sub-populations, and reducing structural barriers in vaccine access.