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Volunteers for Vaccine Registration
Written By: Robin King Austin - Mountaintop Rotary | Issue: 2021/03 – March
A determined cadre of volunteers helps to prevent Covid-19 from establishing a beachhead on the Plateau. For more information, to register, or volunteer, please call (828) 526-1310.
The call went out for volunteers to help register our citizens for the vaccine in the Highlands-Cashiers Plateau Vaccine Initiative.
Within days, people from all over the Plateau started coming together to help their friends and neighbors.
We work hard to assure the volunteers are safe in a sanitized environment, training them and giving them the tools to handle the variety of calls. It’s been a heartwarming experience to work with the volunteers and to hear how grateful callers are for our help.
The H-C Plateau Vaccine Initiative, started by the H-C Health Care Foundation, is fueled by the spirit of volunteers. On any given day, we have 6+ people in the conference room doing data entry, and back office tasks for the system led by Jerry Moore and Michael Murphy.
The call center has six stations for people working the phones and works from 8:00 A.M. to 4:00 P.M., six days a week. Now we are beginning outreach projects to get essential workers, rural poor and the Hispanic community registered.
The initiative has been successful in getting two deliveries of vaccine for the community and had events on Jan 20 and 24 getting vaccines in arms of 976 of our 65 and older members of our community. Our oldest recipient was 102!
Over 50 Clinic volunteers help to make the event run “smooth as honey,” as one recipient said.
HC Hospital Administrator Tom Neal is here every day, making sure we have all we need to be successful, organizing clinics and fighting to get the vaccine for the effort. Robin Tindell, Executive Director of the Foundation, joins Tom in that daily battle and they both coordinate with Macon and Jackson county officials and the state.
Thanks to the generosity of spirit of the volunteers we have a long waiting list registered for appointments to get the vaccine. The challenge now is working the connections to get allocations of vaccine for the plateau. For more information, to register, or volunteer, please call (828) 526-1310.
