Advocacy
PCOA’s Programs Bring Home Awards!
By Maddy Bynes , PCOA Director of Public Policy & Special Projects Next month PCOA staff will be attending the USAging conference in Austin, Texas. At the conference, PCOA will be honored with two awards for two amazing programs! Take YOUR Shot, PCOA’s vaccination campaign, won the Aging Innovation Award for 2022 and PCOA Way, PCOA’s lean management system, won the Aging Achievement Award. Take YOUR Shot: PCOA’s COVID-19 Vaccination Campaign The importance of a COVID-19 vaccine is not a strange subject when it comes to this publication. In fact, we hope that the message of getting a COVID-19 vaccine has become ubiquitous to you. That’s because we’ve put significant effort into ensuring that you, you friends, and your family have the opportunity and information you need to get vaccinated. The Take YOUR Shot campaign began last December when the first COVID-19 vaccine became available on a limited basis to health care workers in the US. At that point, we worked with both elected and appointed officials to include direct care workers and people who worked with Area Agencies on Aging in the first wave of people to get vaccinated. As the State and County continued to rollout the vaccine to people who were eligible, PCOA worked to ensure our clients had access to the vaccine. To do
this, we partnered with Tucson Medical Center and SunVan to offer PCOA clients transportation and appointments without needing access to technology or having supports to drive them. Last March we began to partner with Arizona Center for Empowerment (ACE) to operate a door-to-door campaign aimed at vaccinating vulnerable communities against COVID-19. ACE ran this campaign through the rest of 2021, and with our partnership, knocked on over 100,000 doors and made over 50,000 phone calls. We also ran TV, radio and print ads in both English and Spanish over the summer and fall. These two ad campaigns promoted safe access to the COVID-19 vaccine. In November we launched a TikTok, Instagram, and Facebook campaign that was aimed toward young people getting their vaccines. More than a million young people saw these ads on social media and more than 10,000 people visited PCOA’s COVID-19 webpage, covid19.pcoa.org, to learn more about the vaccine. In February, we expanded our operation to do a door to door and phone banking campaign to encourage people to take their booster shots. The campaign is still active and to date we’ve knocked on over 2,200 doors and made over 13,000 phone calls. PCOA continues to look for volunteers to help expand this important work. Through this campaign, we were able to better educate our community and to
work hard to ensure that everyone has the information they need and the resources they need to access the COVID-19 vaccine. PCOA Way: PCOA’s Lean Management System When you think about non-profits you don’t usually think “lean management.” Such terms tend to be coveted by the corporate world, but what if they have a place in non-profit and government work. In 2015, Governor Ducey announced that the State of Arizona would be implementing the Arizona Management System. The Arizona Management System was soon implemented by agencies around the state and focused on lean principles of management that were geared towards continuous improvement and reducing waste. In 2018, PCOA was chosen to get this training from the Department of Economic Security and has been working to implement a similar system ever since. Though mostly not visible to the public, PCOA’s lean management strategies have increased efficiency and allowed us to address the needs of old adults in the pandemic in an agile manner. We are so excited to win the Aging Achievement Award in this area because it shows that PCOA is a leader in both the Aging Network and in the non-profit space.
June 2022, Never Too Late | Page 23
Pima Council on Aging
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