WilsonHaHawkenProject2021

 We have had many interviews in the past few days.  We interviewed Taneisha Fair, who works at Cleveland Comunity Center. She helped write an article on the Center for Community Solutions Blog titled “Inability to miss work contributed to vaccine hesitancy and likely, lower vaccination rates”. This post showed how the same areas of the county that have both lower vaccination rates and more low-wage workers are also the communities that have more people of color than the affluent communities with higher vaccination rates. These communities are more on the east side of Cuyahoga county, zip codes like 44103, 44104, 44106, 44108, and many others. Refer to my last post for more details about the article. She talked to us about an issue that has come from discussions around Black people and the vaccine that I hadn't talked about before. She talked about how she has heard a lot of people attribute that because of the Tuskegee syphilis trials, Black people don't want to get the vacci...

       We had our first interview! Of course, there were technical issues but that's okay! First, the microphone and speaker outputs I wanted wouldn't work together (which I still need to figure out), and then one of the sound engineers helping us had to hook our first guest, Mr. Waverly Willis, through a phone call because Squadcast isn't supported on mobile devices. Nevertheless, it was a success. Mr. Willis talked about his experience being a liaison between his community and the medical community.       Mr. Willis opened Urban Kutz Barbershop in 2008, where he has a history of looking out for his community in terms of health. He told Sweta and me about how he started this by simply just checking in with his clients about their health and holding them accountable for their medical responsibilities, such as taking their medication every day/week or listening to their doctor about diet recommendations. I think it's only natural that he start...

Sweta and I have been hard at work researching our topic and progressing in the creation of our podcast. We have started to reach out to different people and have already had a few conversations about our topic with various people over Zoom and email. Through new and old, connections, we have been able to schedule 3 interviews so far. Our first will be an interview with Waverly Willis, who owns a hair salon where he also has held vaccine clinics for community members. I think he is a perfect subject for this podcast because I believe that he can speak for both the inequities that have presented themselves in respect to access to the COVID-19 vaccine as well the initiatives made to combat and alleviate these inequities.  Evergreen Podcasts has graciously allowed us to use an outside recording software called "Squadcast" (a platform similar to zoom) to record our interview bookings. This platform is similar to Zoom but is different because each speaker's voice is recorded i...

     Amidst COVID-19, the Black Lives Matter movement, and other social movements, I realized there was so much that I didn’t understand. I challenged myself to continually engage in work that would help me become more knowledgeable, antiracist, empathetic, and compassionate. During the summer and fall of 2020, three friends and I completed an investigative journalism project focused on disparities of COVID-19 cases in low-income communities and communities of color. There had to be a deeper reason why these communities were overrepresented in COVID-19 cases in the United States population. Engaging with Public Health officials, data scientists, professors, healthcare workers, physicians, and COVID-19 survivors, we created a website featuring articles about what we learned, sharing it with our school. I gained an understanding of the longstanding issue of health inequity happening in my backyard of Cleveland and the country. Health care outcomes rely on much more than sim...