In 2021, a coalition of national museum and library associations awarded the Peale (Baltimore, Maryland) a Communities for Immunity grant. The goal of the project is for trusted, local institutions to engage their communities in order to boost COVID-19 vaccine confidence. Since being awarded the grant, we've been gathering stories from people about their experiences with COVID and getting the vaccine.
Whitney Frazier (00:01): So if you'll first just introduce yourself and where we are right now, and anything else about your identity you want to share?
Pat Jones (00:09): Yeah, a good day. So I'm Pat Shannon Jones and I'm the director of the Immigration Outreach Service Center. We are here in our offices and our offices are on the grounds of St. Matthew Roman Catholic church. We are a 501(c)(3), but we are quite blessed to have the community of St. Matthew around us, so that we're able to hear what the needs are of the community. And our community includes people from about 45 different countries, hence our interest in promoting immigration and assistance to all immigrants who come to our door.
Whitney Frazier (00:47): Great. And what has your work been like the last couple years of COVID?
Pat Jones (00:54): So we've been quite impacted by COVID because as we know, we had previously had a lot of refugees coming into the country, that decreased over the last six years, and then COVID hit. And so we've had great challenges but we have been very blessed because we've been able to go to our community of immigrants and ask them what they are comfortable with and how we should perceive with all of our activities that we do.
Pat Jones (01:25): So at the beginning of COVID, we were anxious about having our tutoring program continue in person. And one of the things we did was to talk with parents and to talk with tutors and to decide that we would go virtual and we pivoted very quickly to a virtual setting. And I have to admit our staff was absolutely phenomenal in getting us to virtual and our students though, you'll hear people saying, oh, the students aren't learning as much. I think they've learned more. They're so savvy with laptops and computers and iPhones now that it's really amazing.
Pat Jones (02:04): We have run a virtual tutoring program, a virtual financial literacy, a hybrid computer literacy, and a virtual ESOL program over the last two years. They've been very successful. The clients all like them, because they don't have to ride buses to get here and they're just delighted with it. So we're very pleased with how things have gone and we're about to start our next semester in the next couple weeks. And so we'll be opening our doors again for our hybrid computer literacy and continuing in virtual for all of our other teaching programs.
Whitney Frazier (02:39): And does that serve all the age groups [inaudible 00:02:42]
Pat Jones (02:42): Yes. Well the tutoring program serves from kindergarten up through high school. During the COVID crisis, we did cut out some of the younger age students because they were just having difficulty with the computer. But throughout COVID we've been continuing the tutoring for second grade all the way through high school.
Asset ID: 2022.05.19
Find a complete transcription on the Peale's website.
The views, findings, conclusions or recommendations expressed in the recordings for this project do not necessarily represent those of the Peale or the Institute of Museum and Library Services.
