Fort Deposit Awarded $2.9 Million Grant for Health Literacy Initiative

The town of Fort Deposit have received a large grant to help fight COVID-19 in their community. The grant was awarded to the town by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services and the Office of Minority Health.

Fort Deposit announced their health literacy initiative Monday morning after receiving a $2.9 million grant. The money will be split between Fort Deposit, Linden, York, Clayton, and Hobson City. This initiative will be used to implement the best practices for improving health literacy to enhance COVID-19 vaccinations and the overall health of the communities. The youth in the communities will be a big part of this initiative by becoming health advocates, especially for educating people about the vaccines.

The Executive Director of the Alabama Life Research Institute at University of Alabama, Sharlene Newman, was involved in the planning of the initiative. She had this to add about the youth involvement in the initiative, “There’ll be a big effort on creating youth counsels in each of these communities and then educating these youth around community health, teaching them what the virus is, and how the vaccines work so that they can go out and be advocates for vaccination but also so that they can be advocates for creating a healthy community.”

Each town will choose which youth from the communities will be engaged in working with the health literacy initiative. Over 300 people have been fully vaccinated in these 5 communities.