Evaluation of the MS RIVER Collaborative

Focuses on health education and improving health outcomes in communities of color.

CCRE recently received a $15,000 award to extend its work supporting the Mississippi Recognizing Important Vaccine & Education Resources (MS RIVER) collaborative, a project led by the Town of Inverness in partnership with Delta Health Alliance to improve health literacy and COVID-19 outcomes in eleven Mississippi Delta counties that lie along or in proximity to the Mississippi River. MS RIVER, funded by the Office of Minority Health, focuses on health education and improving health outcomes related to COVID-19 and other health issues in communities of color through the work of Community Health Literacy Navigators. CCRE’s role is to conduct a program evaluation of the implementation and to pursue academic publication of findings related to the grant objectives.

This project is the latest in a line of efforts by CCRE to help its partners combat the effects of the COVID-19 pandemic. CCRE previously supported Delta Health Alliance in its efforts to conduct vaccination outreach in Mississippi through a combination of dashboarding for stakeholders, weekly reporting of vaccination patterns to target outreach efforts, identifying key motivators of vaccination through qualitative interviews of “late-vaccinating” residents, and by implementing a multimodal survey throughout the state to identify trends behind vaccination acceptance or hesitancy.

For more information, contact Dr. Wesley James, professor in Sociology and project PI, at wljames1@memphis.edu.