NIH reached out to communities of color about Covid-19, but some grassroots groups say they were not paid properly

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Mon, 2022-03-07 09:40 — mike kraft

NIH needed help reaching communities of color about Covid-19, but grassroots groups say they were not paid properly Some of the small groups representing communities of color that were contracted as part of a National Institutes of Health Covid-19 outreach project tell CNN they have not been paid properly. Elizabeth Cohen and Lauren Mascarenhas, CNN CNN

(CNN) From the very beginning of his presidency, Joe Biden has pledged to make sure communities hit hardest by Covid-19 will receive sound information about the virus and access to vaccinations.

"Equity (and) equality" remain "at the heart" of the government's responsibility, Biden said at a White House briefing last summer. "We need to go to community by community, neighborhood by neighborhood, and oftentimes, door to door -- literally knocking on doors."

But some of the small groups representing communities of color that were contracted as part of a National Institutes of Health Covid-19 outreach project tell CNN they have not been paid properly.

"We lost trust in the system," said Venus Ginés, president of Día de la Mujer Latina, who said the NIH effort has been "poorly managed from the beginning" and "poorly executed."

"It's a very lousy system, not set up for community engagement, but no matter how much we talk about it and there are apologies for it, there is no attempt to reform it," said Ysabel Duron, executive director of the Latino Cancer Institute in California. "For me, the system has to change."

Under that system, community groups such as Día de la Mujer Latina and the Latino Cancer Institute front money for their NIH projects and get paid back later.

Ginés said participating in the NIH program cost her organization $64,000 in unreimbursed invoices, which the NIH denies.

She said other costs were reimbursed many months late. Duron and the leader of a third community group also said it took months to reimburse tens of thousands of dollars in expenditures, which put a huge stress on their small operating budgets.

Dr. George Mensah, an NIH official, told CNN that many community organizations have been involved with his agency's effort, called the Community Engagement Alliance Against COVID-19 Disparities or CEAL, and he has heard directly about problems with only one of them, Día de la Mujer Latina.

He said NIH's "strategic partnerships" with community-based organizations -- the "boots on the ground" -- play a "critical role" in "building confidence in the vaccine [and] conveying essential messages around prevention, so we take them very, very seriously."

At the center of the issue is the reimbursement model NIH used for the contracts with the community groups. Several of these groups told CNN that while they were aware they wouldn't be paid up front, it has been a huge financial strain to spend tens of thousands of dollars of their own money and then wait -- sometimes for many months -- to get paid back. ...

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